Exposition: Picasso Black and White

Foto: Marcelo Contreras\ AgênciaFM

Picasso Black and White is the first exhibition to explore a remarkable focus that occupied the great Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso, throughout his prolific career: the use of black and white. Few artists have exerted as considerable an influence over subsequent generations as Picasso, one of the most recognized figures in 20th-century art.

The artist was continuously investigating, inventing, and drawing in these austere monochromatic tones. The graphic quality of these distinctive, black-and-white works harks back to the spare paintings of Paleolithic artists, who developed a primal visual language using charcoal and simple mineral pigments, and to grisaille and the European drawing tradition. But in adopting this restricted palette, Picasso was also faithful to a centuries-long Spanish tradition. Spanning 1904 to 1971, this chronological survey includes 118 paintings and several sculptures and works on paper, and investigates Picasso’s contributions to the development of art in the 20th century.

A series of works featuring recumbent women, nudes, and bathers is devoted to the artist’s muse Marie-Thérèse Walter. Many are rendered in grisaille, including Swimming Woman (1934), a commanding and somewhat ferocious painting that may presage the epic style of his masterpiece Guernica (1937), which can be seen in several important related works on view. During this time, he painted The Charnel House (Paris, 1944–45), a forbidding black-and-white canvas that records the brutal devastation of war. The minimal tones, graphic intensity, and dramatic contrasts of dark and light, reflected in Still Life with Blood Sausage (May 10, 1941) and so characteristic of Picasso’s most important paintings, convey a melancholic mood as the artist explores the universality of human suffering, death, and deprivation.

In 1954, Picasso made a series of mostly black-and-white, stylized works of Sylvette David, a young woman symbolizing a new, sophisticated femininity. Picasso’s repeated use of a black, white, and gray palette correlates his obsessive interest in line and form, the influence of drawing, his use of monochrome and tonal values, his complex language of pictorial and sculptural signs, and exercises in light and dark. Picasso Black and White presents an illuminating perspective on this lesser-known, but fascinating, aspect of his formidable body of work. — Francisco Martins and Carmen Giménez, Stephen and Nan Swid Curator of 20th Century Art, and Karole Vail, Associate Curator.

LEIA esta notícia em português: http://fmcultura.blogspot.com.br/2012/10/exposicao-picasso-em-preto-e-branco.html#links

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

October 5, 2012–January 23, 2013

1071 Fifth Avenue

(at 89th Street)

New York, NY 10128-0173