Pablo Picasso is coming to the National Gallery. Not the National Gallery that overlooks Trafalgar Square, but the one in Ireland, housed behind a 19th-century neo-classical façade on Merrion Square in the centre of Georgian Dublin. The National Gallery of Ireland hasn’t, as London’s previously did, limited itself to art before the 20th century, and this autumn will host the major new exhibition, Picasso: From the Studio, in partnership with the Musée Picasso in Paris.
The show will be packed with remarkable works from the single most transformative artist of the 20th century. However, Picasso was also among the most troubling artists of the 20th century – particularly for his attitude to women. The charges begin with the painter’s treatment of Fernande Olivier, the first live-in lover in Paris, whom he locked up in their squalid studio apartment. Then Olga Khokhlova, the ballerina wife Picasso subjected to many indignities, among them his affair with the teenager Marie-Thérèse Walter – his junior by 28 years. There’s Walter’s successor as muse and bedfellow, the artist Dora Maar, whom he struck on occasion, and Françoise Gilot, the mistress Picasso couldn’t forgive for writing a book about their relationship, to the extent of disinheriting their children.
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