Picasso

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CONTENTS 6 INTRODUCTION

Anna Coliva

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PICASSO IN ROME Diana Widmaier-Picasso

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PICASSO THE SCULPTOR. ENORME FLAMME IN THE BORGHESE GALLERY Anna Coliva

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PICASSO AND THE REVITALIZATION OF SCULPTURE Diana Widmaier-Picasso

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FRAGMENTATION AND UNITY IN PICASSO’S CUBIST SCULPTURES Olivier Berggruen

52 MODERNISM IN THREE DIMENSIONS: PICASSO’S SCULPTURE

VIS-À-VIS ANCIENT GREEK AND ROMAN ART Clemente Marconi

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PLATONIC A-MORALITY Donatien Grau

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PICASSO AND MONUMENTAL SCULPTURE: CHICAGO, 1963–1967 Diana Widmaier-Picasso

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PICASSO’S SCULPTURE STUDIO IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF EDWARD QUINN Silvia Loreti | Diana Widmaier-Picasso

117 CATALOG Silvia Loreti | Diana Widmaier-Picasso 243 BIBLIOGRAPHY 250

INDEX 253

PHOTO CREDITS

Introduction

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INTRODUCTION Anna Coliva That of Picasso’s sculpture is the twentieth exhibition held at the Borghese Gallery since I announced the project “10 great exhibitions over 10 years” in 2006, immediately supported by the Ministry as an initiative of national interest.

The idea was to bring a fundamental and completely ordinary principal in large foreign museums to an Italian museum for the first time. This principle seemed to be unattainable in our museums: long-term planning, making decisions well ahead of time on the loans to be requested, the exchanges to be established and the partnerships to be embarked upon. And with outcomes that always met both the expectations of the general public and of scholars, whilst also being capable of attracting the attention of potential sponsors.

Our intent has always been to organize exhibitions conceived inside the museum, choosing the topics from those that might foster our own understanding, rejecting keys-in-hand blockbusters and facile or banal events.

Twelve years have now passed, and we have held double the number of exhibitions that at the time seemed an impossible achievement. Yet the primary aim of our exhibitions, for which we have always chosen themes, artists and critical issues relevant to the Borghese Gallery and the history of its collections, has never changed: to ensure that every visitor experiences the theatrical drama of the clash between Old and New, today as yesterday, at the time of Marcantonio IV and even earlier at the time of Cardinal Scipione.

Our intention today is to bring into this setting the audacious experience of Picasso’s sculpture, perhaps the most brilliant stroke of genius in the history of this art, at least in the modern period. As brilliant as that of Raphael before him, an artist to whom many scholars have compared him to explain his momentous influence.

Beneath the countless unmoving eyes of the surrounding Greco-Roman statues, fixed in an eternal elsewhere, or beneath the roving gaze of the Baroque sculptures, we wish to repeat this vein of modernity and its space as a further metamorphosis of this place, which reveals an inexhaustible heterogeneity whilst remaining profoundly true to itself.

Thanks to all those who have supported us, to the lenders of the works, to those who have collaborated on the organization of the exhibition and on the catalogue. And above all, thanks to the visitors of different geographical origins, ages and cultures who with their elusive presence have always given me and my collaborators the strength to carry on our work.

Diana Widmaier-Picasso Pablo Picasso’s trip to Italy with Jean Cocteau from February 17 to the end of April 1917 for the production of Parade, a new ballet by the Ballets Russes, marked a crucial turning point in the artist’s work.

Picasso began signing his works with his mother’s more Italian-sounding name very early on. As he explained to Brassaï in 1964: “My friends back in Barcelona called me by that name. It was stranger, more resonant, than ‘Ruiz.’ And those are probably the reasons I adopted it. Do you know what appealed to me about that name? Well, it was undoubtedly the double S, which is fairly unusual in Spain. ‘Picasso’ is of Italian origin, as you know. And the name a person bears or adopts has its importance.” Whether Italian, Catalan, or Malagueño, Picasso’s roots were firmly in the Mediterranean.

As an apprentice in La Coruña, Barcelona, and Madrid between 1892 and 1897, Picasso received academic training and learned to draw from plaster casts—Roman copies of lost Greek originals. But his visit to Italy in 1917 gave him an opportunity to study ancient art and works by the masters of the Renaissance in situ for the first time. He soaked up the stimulating atmosphere in Rome, where he stayed at the Hotel de Russie on via del Babuino, between Piazza del Popolo and Piazza di Spagna, and he chose a workshop on via Margutta, with a view over the Villa Medici. Accompanied by composer Igor Stravinsky, the artist toured the city’s museums with great interest. He pondered the countless questions raised by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculptures in the Galleria Borghese—Picasso would certainly seem to have explored this leading museum, although there is currently a lack of archival evidence that would shed more light on this visit—and St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, and he discovered the work of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. In Naples, he was struck by the ancient sculptures in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale and the frescoes excavated in Pompeii. He then admired the paintings of Raphael in Florence before traveling to Milan. This initiatory journey whetted the artist’s insatiable appetite for ancient sculpture and the works of the Renaissance.

Having mastered the classical language early on, he drew from it his own vocabulary and a repertoire of original forms. In “Picasso in His Element,” written in June 1933, André Breton stated that as Picasso the painter had no “bias against color,” Picasso the sculptor had no “bias against material.” Crafter, assembler, modeler, and builder, the artist explored every possible medium and technique. He modeled plaster and clay, carved totems out of pieces of wood, welded iron, engraved pebbles, assembled incongruous objects, folded paper, card stock, and sheet metal, and used bronze to ensure the durability of his sculptures. However, he did not explore the possibilities of marble, a noble material used in classical sculpture, whose potential he was reluctant to acknowledge: “It seems strange to me that someone thought of making marble statues. I understand how you could see something in the root of a tree, a crack in the wall, in an eroded stone or pebble. But marble? It comes off in blocks and doesn’t evoke any image. It does not inspire. How could Michelangelo have seen his David in a block of marble?”

Fascinated by the art forms of the past, Picasso internalized and freely adapted them using innovative and unconventional materials. The heritage of antiquity was one of the main driving forces behind his art, which, in turn, revived antiquity for a modern era. Inspired by works from ancient Rome and the Renaissance to the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, he continuously drew on his classical and, notably, his Mediterranean roots, giving his oeuvre a timeless and universal dimension. Two copies of Michelangelo’s slaves, The Rebellious Slave and The Dying Slave, owned by Picasso, stood guard over his works in his Notre-Dame-de-Vie sculpture studio in Mougins, an ultimate tribute to this heritage.

Picasso in Rome

PICASSO IN ROME

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PICASSO THE SCULPTOR. ENORME FLAMME IN THE BORGHESE GALLERY Anna Coliva

(Apollinaire, 1916) Why bring Picasso and his sculpture to the Borghese Gallery? Into the still intact and never-deflected heart of this place, home to the free vitality of art works so fundamentally characterized as the collection of Cardinal Scipione, despite later historical developments? The series of exhibitions that are for us fundamental precisely in order to preserve the Museum’s vitality of expression have already developed, around Raphael, Lucas Cranach, Correggio and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, monographic treatments of the masters who kindled the artistic imagination of the founding Cardinal and his successors. Then the reflection on our exhibitions intensified to the extent of revealing, to ourselves first of all, what we feel is becoming the Gallery’s true “character”, in all its contemporary vitality: the persisting validity of its original purpose. There have been exhibitions on the antique that welcomed back the masterpieces lost to the Louvre; on the evolution of the still life circumscribed to Caravaggio’s ‘Borghese’ period; then an imagined comparison between Caravaggio and Bacon, and between Giacometti and ancient and Baroque statuary. These and others, also involving contemporary artists, have in our view confirmed the continuing validity of the original purpose that gives the museum its character and represents a source of endless revelations. In short: the Gallery’s contemporary nature.

Sculpture plays a predominant role in the Gallery’s complex and distinctive nature, a multifaceted and mutable character that requires continuous and constant interpretation. The elderly Bernini, master of all artistic techniques, recollected this place that had ‘moulded’ his debut as a statue sculptor as a “forest of statues”. Even today, despite all the transformations undergone by Cardinal Scipione Borghese’s original creation, including its embellishment and reorganization by Prince Marcantonio IV in the second half of the 18th century, and despite the loss of almost five hundred ancient marbles, sold by Prince Camillo to his brother-in-law Emperor Napoleon I in 1807, the Borghese Gallery remains a privileged setting for the symbolism and metamorphosis that every statue of every period carries in itself and with itself. Yet they manifest themselves here in a peerless whole, playing on the counterpoint with myriad artistic images in paintings and in the countless techniques of that luxuriant 18th-century caprice created by Marcantonio IV Borghese’s renovation, which crucially shapes its current appearance.

Symbolism and metamorphosis are recognized by everyone with critical experience of Picasso’s works, from Carl Gustav Jung to Roland Penrose, as the most significant enigma of his sculpture, whatever the differences of period and critical approach. Equally, it is obvious and acknowledged that for Picasso, especially at some points in his career, the use of sculpture represents a peak of revolutionary intensification within key creative processes, occasioning bursts of inventiveness particularly crucial to the history of art as a history of civilization.

To contextualize the absolute originality of Picasso’s approach to sculpture it may be helpful to recall the generally difficult historical conditions weighing on this art from the second half of the 19th century to the middle of the next: the well-known and acknowledged struggle of the most restless and advanced sculptors to find in sculpture a linguistic vitality of modern technique capable of throwing off the conditioning weight of tradition (or its “monstrous anachronism” to cite Boccioni’s colourful formula in his Manifesto tecnico della scultura Futurista of 1912). No other venue is better placed to offer such a universally perceptible account of Picasso’s titanic contribution to resolving the modern problem of sculpture and the volumetric three-dimensionality of form than the Borghese Gallery. This is thanks precisely to the ideal primacy of sculpture, of which it contains a vast variety of types from ancient statuary to the ornamental expressions of the 18th century. Exhibiting Picasso’s works of sculpture as crucial and resolutory high points in his revolution of the form transforms the Gallery into a metahistorical space and effects that transposition of time and space that, given its original purpose, it potentially contains in its collections. Moreover, each of Picasso’s works, in its own unitary and sudden nature (“Unité essentielle qui seule provoque l’extase”, as Apollinaire described it in 1913 with reference to Cubism as

9 Picasso the sculptor. Enorme Flamme in the Borghese Gallery

“Car je ne suis pas seulement peintre, mais aussi sculpteur”

Anna Coliva

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a whole), totally and irreversibly revolutionizes the historical foundations of time and space: for this reason it is the transposition of time and space that is sought after here as the rationale underlying the displays of this exhibition.

With the help of Diana Widmaier-Picasso, Olivier Berggruen, Clemente Marconi and Donatien Grau, our intention is to free Picasso from the customary popularizing approach (an ethically unarguable need, but sufficiently recognized and practiced to occupy much of the existing print and digital bibliography and to dominate the basic narrative and documentary information shaping most exhibitions) and reinstate the purity of his inventive revolution. Purity in the poetic sense proclaimed by Apollinaire at his time, so dizzyingly precocious and connected to calls for the unitary wholeness of the artwork.

Purity and unity, also identified by the poet as metaphysical keys with which to proclaim the novelty of the Cubist painters, are foundational concepts as concerns the past: they form part of the quest for truth and represent the ultimate aspiration of many of the Gallery’s art works, each relative to its own style. Indeed, it is the inspiration generated by the Borghese Gallery’s absolute uniqueness that leads us to rely on Apollinaire as our principal guide to the modes and effects of inserting Picasso into the whirl of paintings, sculptures, artistic forms and images of this Parnassian scene, the product of the magical and impassioned will of a high prelate of the past who, by virtue of his transitory omnipotence, created a residence with the sole purpose of realizing, through art and artists, “le spectacle de sa propre divinité”. The result is an exhibition that aims to consider Picasso’s purity: “Considérer la pureté, c’est baptiser l’instinct, c’est humaniser l’art et diviniser la personnalité”. The Borghese Gallery is a state of pure artifice, making it alone capable of offering universally comprehensible evidence for the “aesthetic meditation” that led the poet to claim, “il faut pour cela embrasser d’un coup d’oeil: le passé, le présent et l’avenir”. In the form of an insight, he gave expression to that same concept of spatio-temporal transmutation mentioned above and that, in its critical and philological classicism, Roland Penrose employed in 1967 to explain Picasso’s sculpture.

Perhaps under the aegis of Apollinaire, evoked by this place, displaying Picasso the sculptor in the Gallery entails reviving the poetic word, a category that forms part of the substance of Scipione Borghese’s Gallery but that later, in the course of historical time, slipped out of its original home and was definitively banished from the modern science of art history. Expelled to give way to philology and critical interpretation in accordance with art historical methodology, the poetic word, so widely used in these rooms when they were first built, has taken away with it a substantial part of the workings and original character of the works collected here, and chiefly those of the Baroque period. And if, as well as reviving the word, we managed to recreate an imaginary mythography as if germinated from the Rafael Alberti of Noche de Guerra in the Museo del Prado, we could imagine, in this exhibition, a Cardinal Scipione wandering around the halls of his Gallery, not so very different in layout from those of the present, and declaiming, with Apollinaire: “Je deteste les artistes qui ne sont pas de leur époque”.

Head of a Woman is a key work that offers an optimal demonstration of the crucial singularity of Picasso’s recourse to sculpture (cat. no. 5). His sudden decision, in September 1909, to create a model and then quickly to cast it in bronze, demonstrates a logic of necessity and thus, in retrospect, the inevitability (Apollinaire again) of this work and of the inventive process to which it belongs. It acts as a final solution concluding the progressive sequence of canvases that, in the previous months and especially the four spent in Barcelona and Horta de Ebro, had as their motif the head of Fernande Olivier (fig. 4 on p. 48). In the latter he had achieved a diffusion of the figure towards a condition of indistinctness from space within a quest for unity, immediately understood by Apollinaire as a discovery pertaining to the general linguistics of Cubism. The latter first put it into words, with brilliant immediacy, as early as 1913 in the Meditations Esthetiques dedicated to the Cubist painters, but with a specificity of imagination that irresistibly evoked the figure of Pablo Picasso. Those splendid canvases, a true apotheosis of painting evolving from Cézanne, lacked the objectivity of the volume, that third dimension magnified to include movement through space over time, which from that point on became Picasso’s ultimate goal.

Silvia Loreti | Diana Widmaier Picasso

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20

Bust of a Woman together

PABLO PICASSO

with the similar yet distinct

Málaga 1881­–Mougins 1973

Head of a Woman (cat. no. 21),

Bust of a Woman

are among the earliest

Boisgeloup, spring 1931

sculptures that Picasso made

Bronze, unique

in the Boisgeloup sculpture

Cast by 1944

studio. They are also the first

78 x 44.5 x 54 cm Musée national Picasso-Paris

in a series of monumental

Inv. MP298

heads that he modeled between

S 131

1931 and 1932, inspired by his young mistress, Marie-Thérèse.

Documentary photographs show the two sculptures in progress, indicating that they were begun as a pair.80 By June 1931, they had developed into the two discrete sculptures that

Figure 9.

Nimba Headdress, XIX century, Paris, Musée Picasso, inv. MP3637 Figure 10.

Boisgeloup, sculpture studio at night, 1932, Paris,

can be seen in this exhibition.

Marie-Thérèse’s distinctive features—her classical profile and cropped hair—provided the point of departure.81 The surprising appearance of Bust of a Woman,

right conditions to undertake large-scale sculpture in

at once composite and disjointed, reflects the still-

plaster, an endeavor that required the space and privacy

inv. MP1986-4

developing nature of the young woman’s appeal. It also

necessary to embrace new technical challenges.

(photo Brassaï)

refers to the diverse cultural and visual traditions that

Musée Picasso,

The Boisgeloup studio lacked heating and

informed Picasso’s idea of

electricity, and one can imagine Picasso, who was

beauty—from the classical myth

a night owl, working relentlessly in the light of a

of the Sphinx to African Nimba

kerosene lamp, like a modern Vulcan. This atmosphere

headdresses, an example of

was beautifully captured by Brassaï, who dramatically

which Picasso owned and kept

photographed the Boisgeloup studio one dark evening

at Boisgeloup (fig. 9).

in December 1932 (fig. 10).84

82

The original plaster of Bust

This Bust of a Woman (1931) and Head of a Woman

of a Woman (1931) was modeled

(cat. no. 21) were cast in cement in spring 1937, to be

at a time when Picasso began

displayed in the Spanish Republic Pavilion at that

to spend extensive stretches

year’s Paris World Fair alongside the bronze of Bather

of time at Boisgeloup. There

(cat. no. 25).85

83

he could meet secretly with

The two heads were cast in the unique bronzes

Marie-Thérèse in a place that

exhibited here during World War II, to be preserved

was both away from Paris,

from bombing. They were likely among the at least

where he maintained his family

twenty very large bronzes from the Boisgeloup period

and professional life, and easily

that, to his great surprise, Brassaï discovered in

accessible from the city. The

Picasso’s Paris studio in September 1943.86

large and hidden premises of Boisgeloup also offered him the

Correspondence kept in the archives of the Musée national Picasso-Paris has revealed that in spring

catalog

155

catalog

157

Silvia Loreti | Diana Widmaier Picasso

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21

In June 1930, an exhibition

PABLO PICASSO

of Matisse’s sculptures opened

Málaga 1881­–Mougins 1973

at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. It

Head of a Woman

included the artist’s Jeannette

Boisgeloup, spring 1931

series (1910–1916), five portrait

Bronze, unique

busts of a woman in which

Cast by 1944

her likeness was progressively

86 x 32 x 48.5 cm Musée national Picasso-Paris

abstracted. The following

Inv. MP300

spring, after settling in

S 132

Boisgeloup, Picasso set to work on this Head of a Woman (1931), which shares with version IV of Matisse’s Jeannette a lumpy treatment of the woman’s features (fig. 12).91 As we know from photographs of the work

Figure 12.

in progress, possibly taken by Picasso himself, this

Henri Matisse,

sculpture was developed simultaneously with Bust of

Jeannette IV, 1913, New York, The

a Woman (see cat. no. 20).92 Both works and the other

Museum of Modern

female heads that Picasso undertook later in 1931 (see

Art, inv. 9.1952

cat. nos. 23–24) were inspired by his lover, MarieThérèse.

Unlike Matisse, however, Picasso rarely worked after a model. Instead, in each of the Boisgeloup heads and throughout the group as a whole, he created a composite portrait of his mistress that presented her multiple facets.

Besides offering a complex “portrait” of Marie-Thérèse in Picasso’s signature style, this

This sculpture was cast in bronze in two separate

Head of a Woman and related

editions: during the war as this unique bronze (for

sculptures condensed in her

dates see cat. no. 20) and in an edition of two issued in

image references to diverse

January 1973, the year of Picasso’s death.94

artistic traditions, from the classical to the non-Western, all felt by Picasso to be equally valid. In this case, Raphael’s La Fornarina (1518–1519) and JeanAuguste-Dominique Ingres’s variants on that theme have been mentioned as probable sources.93

91. Bois 1998, 67–72.

92. Richardson and McCully 2007, 443-8.

93. For the influence of Ingres on the Boisgeloup heads, see Cowling 2008, 35–38.

94. An entry in the Valsuani order books for the period June 1958– January 1974 reads, “Picasso/Tête (0m88) 2 fois” (“Picasso/Head (0m88) twice”). Thanks to Diana Widmaier-Picasso for this reference.