Seventy works by Picasso and more than 100 by 50 of his contemporaries will be heading to the National Gallery of Victoria, in an exclusive new exhibition that will open 10 June as part of the Winter Masterpieces program.
Several years in the making, The Picasso Century will be curated by the deputy director of France’s National Museum of Modern Art, Didier Ottinger. The show will chart Picasso’s impact on the 20th century through his relationships with other artists, poets and intellectuals, as well as the impact of the century’s events on him.
“He is the key man for the century,” Ottinger said. “This show is about how a genius like Picasso could become a genius – he was in touch with everyone. The purpose of this show is to see Picasso’s work develop, from when he arrived in Paris as an impoverished artist, to the end of his life when he was living in the south of France.”
Despite both museums being in Paris, The Picasso Century is the first ever collaboration between France’s Museum of Modern Art, which is in the Pompidou Centre, and the Musée Picasso. Both are sending works to Melbourne.
The exhibition will include significant Picasso works such as Reclining woman (1932), The violin (1914) and Portrait of a woman (1938). It will also feature works by artists including Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse and Dorothea Tanning, as well as artists rarely shown in Australia – if ever – such as Natalia Goncharova, Wifredo Lam and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. The exhibition will also shed light on the Spanish artist’s interactions with intellectuals André Breton, Georges Bataille and Gertrude Stein.
Spread over 15 themed areas, it will include a room on Picasso’s relationship with communism, another on the Spanish civil war (his anti-war stance most famously captured in his 1937 masterpiece Guernica), and one about the creation of cubism, a movement pioneered by Picasso and Braque.
But uniting the show will be Picasso’s notorious ability to absorb influences and ideas from the world around him, Ottinger said.
The NGV’s senior curator of international exhibition projects, Miranda Wallace, said Picasso is widely accepted as a genius.
“But you cannot have genius in isolation,” she said. “It is nurtured and prompted by the places, people and the context of how the artist is working and living. Picasso was like a sponge, absorbing everything around him.”
His contemporary, the Romanian artist Constantin Brâncuși, was less kind. “Picasso is a cannibal,” he once said, describing Picasso’s remarkable if irritating ability to recreate the works of others with his own flair. Picasso biographer John Richardson once wrote: “After a pleasurable day in Picasso’s company, those present were apt to end up suffering from collective nervous exhaustion. Picasso had made off with their energy and would go off to his studio and spend all night living off it.”
Picasso’s sculptures will be shown alongside those of Julio Gonzalez and Alberto Giacometti, to demonstrate how he fed off the work of others. “Brâncuși thought that Picasso would be making Brâncuși sculptures the next day, but maybe better,” Wallace said. “That’s what everyone said – he steals but then he makes it better. He was a fascinating figure in that regard.”
While Covid has seen exhibitions shut early and artworks on loan trapped in lockdowns around the world, the NGV didn’t struggle to put this show together, due to the sheer logistics that were involved in securing the Picasso works before the pandemic.
“We started getting the loans lined up five years ago, because so many of these works are in demand for exhibitions around the world,” said Wallace. “In Europe, they constantly have a Picasso show in many countries at one time. So to get them all reserved for one exhibition took lots of planning.
“We know that we won’t get the international visitation probably that we would have had in normal times. But for our local audiences, who are unable to travel as much or less willing to travel to Europe, I think they will be very delighted to see some of these works that they would otherwise be hoping to see in Paris.”
The NGV exhibition comes two years after Matisse & Picasso, a major show at the National Gallery of Art in Canberra, was forced to close early due to the pandemic. It has been 16 years since the NGV’s last Picasso show, which focused on his relationship with artist and muse Dora Maar.
These days, a Picasso show is sure to be met with more fanfare in Australia than decades previous. In 1939, Keith Murdoch – Rupert Murdoch’s father – sponsored an exhibition of about 200 contemporary European artworks, including pieces by Picasso, Matisse and Vincent Van Gogh. It was shown in Melbourne town hall because the NGV couldn’t make space for it, then travelled to Sydney where the Art Gallery of NSW declined to host it. Picasso, along with the other artists, was displayed in the David Jones department store on George Street instead.
Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition 2022: The Picasso Century will run at the NGV from 10 June to 9 October.
