Just a few weeks after the exhibition Picasso. Figures was completed at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ), here is another presentation on this giant of the 20th century arts in Toronto.e century. We could not envision two such different events.
The exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is not intended to be an overview of this gigantic, protean work, very difficult to summarize, even more to reduce to a few simple formulas. This presentation is not strictly speaking a blockbuster, but rather a comprehensive analysis of a single period, the blue period (1901-1904), obtained at the cost of seven years of research. We can only rejoice in this approach, because this moment of Picassofut’s approach too often eclipsed in favor of other major stages of his career, including the Cubist period which begins with The Ladies of Avignon (1907). Based on three key works – the tub (1901), Woman sitting in a kerchief(1901-1902) and Soup (1903) -, the curators undertook a rereading of this moment when this very young artist (19 to 24 years old) already wanted to be a great painter.
As Kenneth Brummel, one of the co-researchers, explains, it was “to question certain perceptions of the work of the young Picasso”, including that which, “as tradition dictates, that the blue period was mainly inspired by by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas in Paris, in January 1901 ”. Admittedly, this event tinted the art of the young man, but this research rather wanted to show how the blue period embodied the reflection of Picasso on major social problems.
“We have focused more on the impact of Picasso’s visits to women incarcerated at the Saint-Lazare prison-hospital at the end of 1901, visits which really represent the foundations of his commitment to the oppressed women painted during the blue period. “. The association of these “prostitutes, arrested just because they wanted to earn money to eat, studied and treated for their venereal diseases, living in critical situations, sometimes giving birth to their children in this sad place, pushed Picasso to paint pictures that show their suffering in a way that would induce empathy on the part of the viewer ”.
And “even when Picasso lived in Barcelona, he wanted to make the plight of these women understandable to all, and in particular to a Catholic audience, an audience raised in the adoration of the icon of the Virgin Mary, sometimes represented as the Virgin of Sorrows ”. This Virgin full of compassion towards all those who suffer is in the blue period associated with these women begging for money. These women then become worthy of respect. This blue color is also traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary.
Thus, for Brummel, the blue period turns out to be political. Picasso wanted to make people aware of “the inequalities and social inequities that the bourgeoisie of the time did not want to see” and pretended not to know. Why not recognize with respect and mercy the pain of these street women? Yet for Brummel there was then an engaged progressive Catholicism that nurtured a sense of social justice in which Picasso too participated. In this period, he showed a deference to poor women, but also to poor people in general, destitute men making a comeback in the paintings after two years devoted to female figures.
This exhibition at the AGO therefore takes another very different look at the links that Picasso had with women, the opposite of what the MNBAQ tried to demonstrate this summer. Here is an exhibition which is likely to mark the studies on the work of Picasso and which could even lead to a rereading of the famous Ladies of Avignon, of these “young ladies” in the street of prostitutes in Barcelona …
Clothes woven on the fabric of the world