He charge that the American art critic and collector Hamilton Easter Field did to Pablo Picasso in 1909 to decorate a room in his house in Brooklyn, New York, and which never saw the light of day, is the subject of a new exhibition about the genius from Malaga at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) that joins the celebrations of the year Picasso in the Big Apple.
The sample “Picasso: a cubist commission in Brooklyn”which will open its doors next Friday, only brings together a few panels and some drawings by the artist, but its main curator, Anna Jozefacka, hopes that the works will serve to “expand the expectations about cubism” of its visitors.
In statements to EFE, the architectural historian also says that she came across the history of the Field’s lost commission When investigating the relationship between cubism and architectural space during a fellowship at the Met between 2015 and 2017.
Field was ahead of his time, one of the first admirers of the experimental cubism of Picasso in the United States, and in 1909, after meeting him during a visit to Paris, he asked him for a series of paintings to decorate the library of his Brooklyn residence.
Picasso He accepted, and a year later he received a letter from the American with several drawings describing the room, dimensions modest, and the spaces that must be occupied by paintings.
“As you know, in any case I give you complete freedom. Do what you think best suits the room”Field wrote in French. The document occupies a central place (literally) in the sample of the Met, behind a glass case in the center of the room, along with several photographs of the neighborhood where Field lived and a wooden relief that he commissioned to decorate the same library.
He collectorHowever, he never saw the work. He died in 1922, before Picasso could finish the panels ordered. The commission remained unpaid and the artist sold the paintings to individuals during the following years.
Field’s letter to the painter from 1910 remained among the personal archives of Picasso and it was the engine that drove the investigation de Jozefackawho has managed to bring together six works whose strange dimensions hint at their truncated destiny, on the doors and between the walls of the collector’s narrow library.
The pictures represent a critical moment in the evolution of the artist: his move to the most abstract cubism and his obsession with the female nude, which he stretches more and more until reaching a vertiginous narrowness.
To contextualize these images, almost barely distinguishable lines and semicircles on the different shades of brown, the curator has included some drawings in charcoal and oil that show the evolution of the female figure in the cubist work of Picasso.
The sample is added to several in New York museums such as the Guggenheim or the MoMA, which this year have offered new windows to the work of the Spanish painter to mark the fifty years since his death, in 1973, as part of the Year Picasso promoted by France and Spain.
2023-09-12 20:17:00
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