Becoming Picasso - The Courtauld Gallery, London

Becoming Picasso – The Courtauld Gallery

Whenever I am faced with writing critically about Picasso I am presented with a problem. I think he is a genius! This may not seem to be a problem to others but I certainly feel it clouds my ability to be critical. Instead I feel like glorifying him as the unbelievable artist he was; a visionary, a painter and an artist that was always prepared to defy conventions and explode the artistic and cultural genres of the moment as well as creating unbelievable masterpieces.

The Courtauld Gallery presents us with a relatively small collection of some of Picasso’s most daring, beautiful, evocative and soulful paintings. As you enter the first room you are at once confronted with the real colour that is so distinctive of Picasso’s work. Rich reds, blues ,greens and browns accost us. The works on display figure from the early 1900’s and in fact 1901 was a breakthrough year for Picasso as we see him launching his career in Paris with his first major exhibition at the gallery of art dealer Ambroise Vollard. We learn that Picasso worked furiously for several weeks, often producing three paintings in one day.

His rather unusual portrait of ‘Bibi la Puree’ – a grotesque, ugly absinthe drinker and bohemian who used to inhabit the bars and salons of the demi monde in Paris is outstanding. The art critic Jonathan Jones aptly points out Picasso’s originality in his choice of portrait and his appetite for ugliness. Jones demonstrates Picasso’s fascination with the low life and demi monde and his fondness for the other famous artist of Parisian night life, Toulouse Lautrec. His portrait shows no mercy as he paints his leering grin, dandyish bold clothes; you can almost smell the wine that is coming from his bad breath. Similarly Picasso’s portrait of the dwarf dancer , ‘La Nana’ also highlights this fascination for nightlife and the low life that inhabited the streets and dance halls of Montmartre.

In the second room of the exhibition we are presented with paintings that collectively formed part of Picasso’ s Blue Period’ in its early stages. Painted during the years 1901-1904 this was a time when Picasso painted essentially monochromic paintings in differing shades of blue and blue green and often chose doleful subject matter and austerity. The paintings in the room are more melancholic and sombre in tone and pitch. Many of his subjects are sorrowful figures living on the fringes of society or outcasts. His painting, ‘Harlequin and companion’ is subdued and unusual. The orange of the girl and the blues of the harlequin seem to clash together to create a subdued and sad atmosphere. In many ways Picasso is reinventing café society painting by focusing on members of society that were margionalised. Another sorrowful painting is his ‘Casagemas in his coffin’ – a close up of his friend’s head, painted in an eerie, intense blue, who sadly committed suicide in a Montmartre café. The mood is deeply sombre and introspective hinting of melancholic and great sorrow. It was his death that apparently inspired the beginning of the Blue Period as Picasso was known to have said, “I started painting in blue when I learned of Casagema’s death’. In contrast to these paintings is one of the highlights of the whole exhibition – it is his beautiful and evocative ‘Child with a dove’. Here we see a child holding a dove close to her chest and standing in front of a subdued blue background and next to a multi colored ball. It is a soft, peaceful painting that both celebrates the serenity and the fragility of childhood. The little girl is protected and closeted and there is little of the sombre mood that embue the other paintings indicating that it was painted just before the beginning of the Blue Period.

Go and see this magnificent exhibition while it lasts, there are many masterpieces to admire and a chance to lose yourself in the colours and brilliance that is Picasso.

By Larissa Woolf, Arts Editor, VisitMuseums.com

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Roy Lichtenstein - A Retrospective - Tate Modern

Roy Lichtenstein – A Retrospective – The Tate Modern.

  ​The Tate Modern is hosting a huge retrospective of the work of the renowned American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein (1923 – 1997). This exhibition is the first comprehensive portrayal of his art since his death in 1997 and features many of his most famous works. Lichtenstein was one of the most influential and famous artists of his time and became a central figure in the 20th century art world. He broke with abstract expressionism in the 1960’s and formed  a new concept of painting based on comic strips, advertising and mass culture imagery.

​The show takes a roughly chronological theme to present the development of Lichtenstein’s artistic ideas which grew into the popular art movement it was to become. In one of the first pictures of the show, ‘Brushstrokes’ we see how the brushstroke in effect takes the central stage in the picture.  Lichtenstein always uses primary dramatic and fluorescent colours to give instantaneous effect. His objective was to make the stroke a controlled act not just a spontaneous expression of the artist’s feeling. In his famous early work called ‘Look Mickey’ we see how he imitated the industrial technique of comic books using primary colours , heavy black outlines and his signature style of Benday dots. It was the first time he used popular imagery and we learn from his wife, Dorothy Lichtenstein , who comments on a lot of the exhibition in the audio guide, that his inspiration came from an illustrated story book and that part of Lichtenstein’s concern was not to reveal anything about himself in his art. His later transformation of household objects such as a glove, spray can or ring continues this dissociation of his feelings from his art and they become a statement of his work. In many of these paintings there are allusions to the actual act of painting as well as the art work becoming a metaphor for painting itself.

  ​Lichtenstein was fascinated by circular images and the idea of a perfect unified image as can be seen in the Black and white room. One of his ideas was to fill the entire canvas with the image he was drawing in order to achieve the exact fit between the work and its subject. ‘So in Portable Radio’, finished in 1962,  the radio takes on the whole of the canvas and thus, as Lichtenstein wanted, ‘the painting itself can be thought of as an object.’ In his large scale paintings in the War and Romance room we see how they propelled him to  almost instantaneous success as he transformed two popular subjects – war and romance – into iconic pop paintings. These subjects took over the whole of the canvas seen for example in his 1962 painting ‘Masterpiece’ which was a favourite of the time and in ‘Wham’. The idea that the nature of a cartoon is as far away from traditional art as you can get appealed to Lichtenstein and became the driving force of his artistic endeavour in the 1960’s. These paintings remind me of the paintings he produced in later years, in the 1990’s which are collectively called ‘The Nudes’ in the exhibition. Here Lichtenstein turns to the female subject and produces art in a new and provocative way. Huge, life size paintings of blonde, monumental healthy women are assembled together. The overall result for me was as if I was at a health pageant and we learn from his wife in the audio that Lichtenstein idolised women and viewed them as partly real and partly ironic. The painting ‘Blue Nude’ for example portrays a life size profile of a woman’s nude body and is erotically graphic. Moreover her expression and experience of desire itself as she is shown captured in a state of reverie reveals her own subjective experience of desire. She becomes both an object of desire and a subject of her own sexuality which is a heavy double entendre.

​One of my favourite parts of the show is where we see Lichtenstein copying from and getting artistic inspiration from artists such as Matisse and Picasso. We see him in dialogue with the artists of the past where he playfully makes vivid recreations of famous works. In ‘Frolic’ for example he makes a series of paintings referring to Picasso’s obsessive affairs with Marie Therese Walter. Lichtenstein’s is a surreal version of the original Picasso and there are many layers of meanings in the painting. Likewise his painting of ‘Femme d’Alger' in 1963 is an open acknowledgement of how much he has learnt from Picasso and his 1955 painting , ‘Women of Algiers’ .

​The exhibition is extensive and thorough portraying all of Lichtenstein’s different major artistic periods. It should definitely be at the top of your ‘must see’ exhibitions of the year.

by Larissa Woolf, Arts Editor, VisitMuseums.com

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