From March 9 until June 16, 2019, the exhibition Picasso: The Late Work. From the Collection of Jacqueline Picasso was shown at Museum Barberini in Potsdam. The exhibition catalogue remains available (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de). It shows all works presented in Potsdam and features contributions by ten diffent authors. The exhibition and catalogue were curated by guest curator Bernardo Laniado-Romero and associate curator Valerie Hortolani.
The over 130 late Picasso works from the collection of Jacqueline Picasso were generously lent to Museum Barberini by her daughter Catherine Hutin. Apart from a few exceptions, they were on display in Germany for the first time.
According to Ortrud Westheider, Director of Museum Barberini, the exhibition (and catalogue) Picasso: The Late Work demonstrates that the artist did not lose his ability (to quote Brassaï) to “assault” and
surprise, with an openness that makes his images seem just as fresh today. During a period that gave rise to a host of new artistic approaches, the medial diversity in Picasso’s art was revolutionary. His late work forms a bridge from the avant-garde work of classical modernism to the post avantgarde movements of the 1960s, and continues to shape the work of artists today.
During the last two decades of his life, from 1954 until 1973, Pablo Picasso’s work took stock of his past. Revisiting his own oeuvre, he picked up familiar themes and revitalized them, but he did so in light of current developments and often in dialogue with other artistic works—from the Old Masters to Delacroix, Matisse and pop art. Pablo Picasso embraced painting, drawing, ceramics and sculpture with renewed vigor and a large stylistic variety. His obsession with the female form grew more intense as he portrayed Jacqueline Picasso, his second wife, in hundreds of works, more than any of his other muses.
Catalogue photographs reveal the ways Pablo Picasso continued to reinvent his art as he aged. His late works were rarely shown. They owe their reputation to widely circulated photographs taken by Lucien Clergue, David Douglas Duncan and Edward Quinn, among others. They show Pablo Picasso and his wife Jacqueline in the studios at La Californie, in the workshop at Mougins to the north of Cannes and at the family retreat of Château de Vauvenargues in Provence.
In addition, the catalogue Picasso: The Late Work. From the Collection of Jacqueline Picasso offers fascinating insights into how the artist’s contemporaries reacted to this stage of his oeuvre, his relationships with younger artists and with popular culture as well as into the pivotal role played by Jacqueline Picasso within the artist’s enduring legacy.
The catalogue essays and the various sections of the exhibition focus on subjects such as Picasso’s interior landscapes created at La Californie, painting as drama, the figure of the musician in Picasso’s late work, travesty and paraphrase in Picasso’s late prints and their sources, the Picasso retrospectives during the 1950s and 1960s, Jacqueline Picasso and her time: portraits of a relationship, images of affections, interiors and landscapes, studies and fragmentations, Picasso’s focus on the figure, the nudes, the artist and his models, music and dance as visual forces, bullfighting and mythology, monumentalism and the male figure. In addition, the catalogue features a chronology of Picasso’s late work from 1954 until 1973. Plenty to discover for anyone interested in Pablo Picasso!
Edited by Ortrud Westheider and Michael Philipp: Picasso: The Late Work. From the Collection of Jacqueline Picasso. Hardcover, Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Prestel, 2019, 24 x 30 cm, 248 pages with 224 color illustrations. Order the English version of the catalogue from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
The catalogue front cover shows Pablo Picasso’s work Madame Z (Jacqueline with Flowers) from the year 1954 (cat. 4).
Regarding Pablo Picasso, read also our articles The Young Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods, Picasso Sculpture and Pablo Picasso — The Sculptures.
If you are interested in Picasso’s late work, visit the famous Rosengart Collection in Lucerne, Switzerland which features 32 Picasso’s, mainly from his late period.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations from the book reviewed here are not put between quotation marks.
Book review added on April 2, 2020 at 12:11 German time.
