Until May 26, 2019 you can visit the outstanding exhibition The Young Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods at Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland. It unites some 75 master pieces (English catalogue: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr).
The exhibition covers the period from 1901 until 1907: from the time the young man became “Picasso”, as he began to sign his works in 1901, until the first proto-Cubists pictures from 1907, created in the context of the painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (today exhibited at the MoMA in NYC), including the work Woman (Femme). That work stands as the chronological starting point of the Picasso collection assembled by Ernst and Hildy Beyeler. It (most likely) originated as a study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
The exhibition at Fondation Beyeler begins with the early works from 1901, the first ones still created in Madrid, the bulk of them made during Picasso’s second stay in Paris. The vivid colors reflect the influence painters such as Vincent van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had on the young Spaniard.
From the late summer onward, following the tragic suicide of his artist-friend Carles Casagemas, who had accompanied him during his first visit to Paris in 1900, Picasso began work on a series of pictures dominated by the color blue.
Picasso’s so-called Blue Period works, pervaded by an atmosphere of melancholy and spirituality, lasted until 1904. They were inspired by Symbolist works as well as by the expressive style of El Greco. Picasso was engaging with existential questions of life, love, sexuality, fate and death, movingly embodied by fragile, introverted figures. They mainly depict marginalized victims of society in vulnerable situations—beggars, people with disabilities, prostitutes and prisoners who live in poverty, misery and despair. At the same time, those victims are surrounded by an aura of dignity and grace. The mood of those works reflect Picasso’s own precarious circumstances before his artistic breakthrough.
In 1904 Pablo Picasso finally relocated to Paris and set up his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir. At this point, he met Fernande Olivier, his first longer-term companion and muse. In consequence, his works gradually break free from the limited palette dominated by the color blue. Warmer rose and ochre tones appear, altough the underlying mood of melancholy persists.
Picasso’s works are increasingly populated by jugglers, performers and acrobats, personifying the anti-bourgeois, bohemian life of the circus and the art world.
In 1906, Picasso achieved his first major commercial success, when the dealer Ambroise Vollard bought nearly the entire stock of new pictures in his studio. This enabled the artist and his muse to spend several weeks in the Catalonian mountain village of Gósol. The simple countrylife inspired Picasso to paint mainly pictures of human figures in idyllic, primordial settings, combining classical and archaic elements.
In the fall of 1906, after his return to Paris, Picasso was still absorbing the impressions from Catalonia while also integrating the world of Paul Gauguin into his work. In his quest for a new artistic authenticity, he formulated a a Primitivist pictorial language. The result was an innovative reduction and simplification of the human figure. In contrast to his previous works depicting fine-limbed people of the circus world, his new figures were bulky and heavy.
In 1907—last, but not least under the growing influence of African and Oceanic art—Picasso invented Cubism and created Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
The Beyeler exhibition The Young Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods has been organized in collaboration with the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie and the Musée national Picasso-Paris. The Fondation Beyeler show differs from the Paris presentation by the inclusion of the artist’s first proto-Cubist pictures from 1907.
The Galerie Beyeler devoted 11 monographic exhibitions to Picasso, included his work in numerous group shows and, over several decades, bought and sold over 1000 works by Picasso. Ernst and Hildy Beyeler formed a friendly relationship with the artist. In the end, 33 works by Picasso passed into the Beyeler Collection. Strikingly, the Beyeler Collection does not possess a single Blue or Rose Period work: the couple concentrated on Picasso’s work from 1907 on. Nonetheless, key pictures from the Blue and Rose Periods—including La Buveuse assoupie (1902), Femme au corbeau (1904) and Acrobate et jeune arlequin (1905)—were exhibited, placed and sold by the Galerie Beyeler.
The exhibition and catalogue The Young Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods offer insights into the Vollard Show of 1901, the exhibitions at the Berthe Weill Gallery the following year, the Erotic Picasso, the artist’s atelier at the Bateau-Lavoir, the Serrurier Exhibition of 1905, the Stay at Gósol, Picasso the Engraver and Picasso the Sculptor, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and much more. Both the exhibition and the catalogue are outstanding.
The exhibition catalogue: Picasso: The Blue and Rose Periods. Fondation Beyeler, Hatje Cantz, 2019, 300 pages. Order the English book from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr. The exhibition at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen near Basel, Switzerland ends on May 26, 2019.
The exhibition catalogues by Beyeler and the Hatje Cantz book shop catalogues seem to have slightly different book cover titles: Picasso: The Blue and Rose Periods and The Young Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods. However, the content is identical.
This article is based on the Beyeler exhibition catalogue. For an easier reading, quotations and partial quotations have not been put between quotation marks.
