A small sample in the museum Guggenheim of New York delves into a crucial stage in the life of Pablo Picasso: the stay of the Spanish painter in Paris with barely 20 years of age, in which he was captivated by the city of light and began to excel in art.
The exhibitionwhich opened to the public this Friday, is part of the celebrations of the Year Picasso and focuses on one of the jewels in the collection of the Guggenheim, “The Moulin de la Galette” (1901), which the museum accompanies with nine other works, including canvases, paintings on cardboard, watercolors and charcoal drawings.
Picasso traveled from Barcelona to Paris in the autumn of 1900, in the last weeks of the Exhibition Universal, in which he participated, and although he did not master the French language, those two months he spent there were enough for him to want to return in 1901 and stay for almost a year, soaking up the culture.
“Le Moulin de la Galette” is one of the first works he painted therea night scene in a dance hall in Montmartre, the bohemian neighborhood where he lived and frequented the “cabarets” and cafes that were open until late at night, where social and class differences were blurred.
He Guggenheim follows the trend of other museums in focus on gender issuesand suggests looking at the subjects in the painting, mostly women dancing in the background and others in the foreground with heavy makeup, and keeping in mind that there may be “hiding in plain sight” “trans” and “queer” people.
It also alludes to the razaexplaining that Picasso confronted the prevailing “hierarchical ideas of race and empire” that put whites above blacks, and that he came into contact with African arts, which influenced his practice, through a “lente colonial” that reduced them to artifacts.
Another important work is “The fourteenth of July” (1901), in which he portrays a crowd at a French national celebration but, unlike the star painting, uses an almost impressionistic style, encapsulating the “joy” of the moment as well as his “melancholy for the marginality and poverty that saw” in Paris.
Among other pieces, two of the four self-portraits that the painter is believed to have made in 1901, at the age of 20, stand out, one in which he is depicted tired, pale and with marked cheekbones, and another in which he has a “strong look”. and “Spanish” and that is attributed to his “period of introspection and counterclaim,” according to the museum.
And the portraits of two women, also from 1901, which evoke his admired Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and in which the only mention is made of the now highly criticized “objectifying” gaze of Picasso about the woman, pointing out that one of the paintings was more of a “seductive object of consumption”.
As a curiosity, the exhibition includes a charcoal drawing that can be understood almost as a photograph of the young Picassosince the experts have identified the figures of the scene as him with his friends Ramón Pichot, Miquel Utrillo and Carles Casagemas and the models Odette and Germaine.
2023-05-12 21:33:00
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