Museo Picasso Málaga Exhibits 'Muses and Models'

Written by Kristy Plaza Monday, 18 January 2010 21:02

Málaga, Spain - Over the course of his life, Pablo Picasso produced an extensive number of works featuring women – his favorite subject.  Whether delicately sensual or profoundly carnal, temperamental or serene, these women did not merely pose; rather, through the master’s gaze, they played an active role in the creative process, becoming muses and sources of inspiration for the man who loved them and immortalized them in his work.

On exhibition until 28 February, 2007, the Museo Picasso Málaga presents the exhibition Picasso.  Muses and Models.  Through 46 paintings, 14 drawings and 6 sculptures, the show illustrates the powerful female presence in Pablo Picasso’s art, constantly as a model and on no few occasions as inspiration.

No one has ever matched Picasso in the way he filled his canvases with his models, women who often played the dual role of lover and muse in the artist’s life.  Models, or muses, who exercised considerable inspirational power throughout Picasso’s artistic career.  We may well say that Pablo Picasso is reflected in his model in what is the ultimate confirmation of his identity as a painter, and that each model – due, perhaps, to the ancestral relation to the muse – is something of the artist’s alter ego, the mirror in which he is reflected.

Picasso.  Muses and Models explores Picasso’s manifold representations of the female figure and his evolution, inspired by Fernande Olivier, Olga Kokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar and Jacqueline Roque over a long period spanning the years from 1906 to 1971.  Many the works featured have been shown on few occasions, and come from private collections in France and the United States.

A bilingual catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition, containing essays by Robert Lubar, Professor of Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts (New York University) and Estrella de Diego, Professor of Art History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Coproduced with the Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales.  Ministerio de Cultura.  All of the works featured in this exhibition originally formed part of the collection of Jacqueline Picasso, his second and last wife.Picasso’s last years are particularly well represented in the exhibition, as the works featured – lent by public and private collections – originally formed part of Jacqueline’s collection. Understandably this is a highly personal group of works, one that Picasso deliberately chose to keep close to him and whose intimate nature make us privy to the artist’s life.

From Fernande Olivier to Jacqueline Picasso

The exhibition, then, reveals to us something of Picasso’s artistic and private universe.  In it, his first companion, Fernande Olivier, represented in bronze, is given hard, chiseled features that are far removed from the youthful countenance of the model.  After Fernande, Eva Gouel would inspire an art immersed in the cubist period and represented in the exhibition by Woman in an Armchair (1913). Picasso would tell Guillaume Apollinaire about this painting: “You can see it’s a real woman. Even what’s hidden is there”.

For most of the next decade, the image of the ballerina Olga Kokhlova, Picasso’s first wife, dominates his work. She’s seen in many guises in our own Collection, where she plays contrasting roles, from the bourgeois lady to the primal, monumental mother figure.  Nonetheless, it was probably Picasso’s next lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was represented in the most versatile array of forms: from an approachable, dreamy-eyed, silent young woman to the inaccessible sensuality of an almost mythological creature. 

Quite the opposite occurred with Dora Maar, one of the most outstanding surrealist photographers of her day and Picasso’s companion in the 1930s.  Dora photographed Picasso whilst he painted Guernica (1937), and hers is the anguished face he reproduced in preliminary drawings for this great painting, one of which is included in this exhibition, Woman Crying, (1937).

The works inspired by Picasso’s last companion, Jacqueline Roque, are the most numerous in the exhibition and also the most varied with regard to theme and style.  In some works she is portrayed with delicate naturalism, in others schematized to the extreme.  The image that Picasso reveals of his second wife is rich in nuance.  The different ways in which the artist represents Jacqueline verges on the playful, hinting at the artist’s love of the theater: dressed all in black, posing like a child with her legs crossed on a rocking chair, dressed as a Turkish or Spanish lady, playing with her dog, or simply inviting reverence, like a long-necked goddess.

Though painting predominates in the works brought together in Picasso. Muses and Models, the show also features drawings in charcoal, ink and Conté pencil, sculptures in bronze and sheet metal and collages.

Picasso. Muses and Models has been organized by Bernardo Laniado-Romero, director of the Museo Picasso Málaga, and coproduced with SECC, the Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, Ministerio de Cultura.  The works have been lent by both public and private collections in Switzerland, the United States and France, among them the Musée Picasso, Paris, and the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg.

Visit the Museo Picasso Málaga at : www.museopicassomalaga.org/