Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso’s transformative exploration of Expressionism during the last two decades of his life is the subject of a major exhibition at Pace Gallery this fall in New York. Picasso & Jacqueline: The Evolution of Style presents the artist’s obsession with Jacqueline Roque, his homage to Henri Matisse, and the inspiration he found in classical and modern painters. Presented at both Pace in Midtown (32 E. 57th Street) and in Chelsea (534 West 25th Street), Picasso & Jacqueline will run from October 31, 2014 to January 10, 2015.

Picasso & Jacqueline is the first exhibition to examine Picasso’s transformation in style as seen exclusively through the portraits of Jacqueline with more than 125 works including oil paintings, drawings, sculptures, etchings, aquatints, and linocuts. It also marks the sixth exhibition organized by the Pace Gallery to be devoted to the artist. The other exhibitions were: Beyeler at Pace: Modern Masterworks from the Beyeler Gallery (1971); Picasso: The Avignon Paintings (1981), the first gallery exhibition ever of the late works which inspired the major 1984 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Picasso: The Late Years, 1963-73; The Sculpture of Picasso (1982); Je suis le cahier—The Sketchbooks of Picasso (1986-89), which traveled to fifteen museums in six countries; Picasso and Drawing (1995); Pablo Picasso: Works from the Estate and Selected Loans (1998); and Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism (2007).

“Through the 1970s and into the early 1980s, Picasso’s late works were poorly received,” said Arne Glimcher, founder of the Pace Gallery. “With Pace’s 1981 exhibition, Picasso: The Avignon Paintings, critics, art historians, and an entire generation of young artists came to recognize Picasso’s vital late work. It remains a privilege to work with the Picasso family and estate, and I am grateful for their incredible collaboration.”

Picasso & Jacqueline is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Jonathan Fineberg, Edward William and Jane Mart Gutgsell Professor of Art History Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, on the evolution of Picasso’s style from 1954 to 1973; art historian and art critic Barbara Rose, on Jacqueline as Picasso’s muse; and independent curator Daniel Leers, who writes a biographical history of Jacqueline and Picasso’s relationship. Rose notes in her essay, “As memory crowds out the present, Jacqueline becomes Picasso’s entire universe. She is everywhere, in his dreams, in his fantasies and in the representations of his ongoing personal theater. Jacqueline is the ultimate muse because he sees through her the muses of his own heroes El Greco, Velazquez, Delacroix, and Manet.”

The exhibition begins in 1954, the year Picasso started living with and painting Jacqueline Roque (they married in 1961). It was also the year Matisse died. An early rival and later good friend of Picasso, Matisse was the only contemporary that Picasso considered his equal. “Au fond, il n’y a que Matisse,” Picasso frequently said: “All things considered, there’s only Matisse.”

Picasso & Jacqueline includes ten works from the artist’s series Les Femmes d’Alger [Women of Algiers](1954-1955), including four of the oils that comprise the series of fifteen variations; several oil studies; etchings; and an aquatint. Inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s 1834 painting of the same title in the collection of the Louvre, Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger is also a tribute to Matisse. This exhibition is perhaps among the most complete presentation of paintings and related works from the Les Femmes d’Alger series since Picasso sold the paintings to American collectors Victor and Sally Ganz in 1956.

With the Les Femmes d’Alger Picasso set out on a course of reinterpreting great works by earlier masters, including Velázquez's Las Meninas (1957) and Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1959–1962), a series represented in Picasso & Jacqueline by two oil paintings. During this period Picasso also evoked various phases of his own work (Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism), as well as those of Matisse (the cut-outs, the odalisques and their heavily patterned Moorish backgrounds). In a matter of months, Picasso created a body of work that referenced his achievements of the first 73 years of his life, acknowledged his great respect for Matisse and Delacroix, and pointed the way forward to an Expressionist style that proved to be an influence on later Neo-Expressionist artists.

In his essay, “The Sensual Garden of Picasso’s Late Work,” Fineberg writes, “After the Women of Algiers, the empathy that emerges, and the new directness in his expression of his experience is unprecedented in Picasso’s work. The drama of his previous relationships with women has mellowed and instead of finding another lover seven years after moving in with Jacqueline, as had been his pattern, Picasso married her in 1961 and then remained with her.”

Also in the exhibition are several variants of “Artist and his Model” and “Woman in the Studio.” A late work, from just four years before Picasso’s death, is the tender and nearly elegiac 1969 double portrait, Le Couple.

The exhibition includes unusually personal works, as well. Jacqueline with Paloma and Catherine (1960) shows Jacqueline with her daughter from her first marriage, Catherine Hutin, and Paloma Picasso, the artist’s daughter with his companion of the 1940s and early ‘50s, Françoise Gilot. Also in the exhibition is Jacqueline Dressed as a Bride Full Face I (1961), an aquatint and drypoint that commemorates Picasso and Jacqueline’s wedding.

Accompanying the exhibition is group of more than 50 photographs by David Douglas Duncan, one of the central documentary photographers of the 20th century and a confidant of Picasso. Duncan captured Picasso at work as well as scenes from quotidian life with Jacqueline, the muse who inspired Picasso’s last two decades. In many of the photographs she is seen sitting in a chair dressed in various costumes and accessories that Picasso incorporated into portraits of her.

Works in the loan exhibition come from members of Picasso’s family and from the estate of Jacqueline Roque. Among the major institutions lending to the exhibition are the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Tate Modern, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. A number of important works from private collections will be featured as well.