Picasso Show To Highlight Influences
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Pablo Picasso dreamed of hanging his paintings next to those of Velazquez, Goya, Manet, and the many other masters he admired. Thirty-five years after his death, that dream is coming true.
In a three-part Paris exhibition, Picasso’s paintings will be placed alongside those of the artists he emulated, drew inspiration from, and paid tribute to throughout his life, including El Greco, Titian, Rembrandt, van Gogh, and Gauguin.
“Picasso et les Maîtres,” or “Picasso and the Masters” (October 8, 2008-February 2, 2009), will be held mainly at the Grand Palais, with smaller, related shows at the Louvre Museum and the Musée d’Orsay.
More than 200 paintings and drawings by the likes of van Gogh, Cézanne, and El Greco have been selected from museums and private collections worldwide. The works have been arranged by theme: self-portraits, still lifes, female portraits, tarot cards, nudes.
From early childhood, Picasso spent time copying masters at the Prado museum in Madrid and later at the Louvre, said Marie-Laure Bernadac, one of the show’s two curators, who is in charge of contemporary art at the Louvre.
The main exhibition will be set under the glass dome of the Grand Palais, where a 19-year-old Picasso first showed his works during the Universal Exposition in 1900. By then, he had spent years copying Spanish masters such as Velazquez and Francisco de Zurbaran, whose paintings will be brought in from the Prado.
In the second of the three exhibitions, the Louvre will show those Picasso paintings that were inspired by Delacroix’s “Femmes d’Alger.” The Musée d’Orsay will host the smallest of the three: around Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” which was a continuous source of inspiration to Picasso, according to Anne Baldassari, director of the Picasso Museum in Paris and the show’s other main curator.
Most of the paintings will be hung within days of the opening, because major museums want to keep them until the last minute, according to Ms. Baldassari. “We will have to sprint to the finish,” she said. “But for me, it’s a dream come true, the work of a lifetime.”
