Picasso: The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Picasso: The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier Details
Review "In the 30 years since his death, the epic career of Pablo Picasso has sustained endless parsing and subdivision, yielding exhibitions of ever sharper focus. But few of these shows equal the spectacular close-up provided by Picasso: The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier at the National Gallery of Art. . . . [A] revelatory, singularly moving show."---Roberta Smith, New York Times"In this . . . exhibition . . . we get to see one subject, explored in depth by one astounding artist, at one impossibly important moment in the history of art. It gives us the chance to really concentrate on a few works that don't stop posing questions and striking sparks off each other. . . . Picasso is working without the rules--and without a net--and every single move has to be figured out from scratch, tested just by launching into it. . . . I cannot think of any other moment in the history of art where an artist has this much freedom, and has to decide all for himself what he should do with it. . . . He's not working toward cubism, or any other -ism for that matter. He's just working. . . . Picasso is not the alchemist-magician that became his favorite pose; he's more like an eager young genius working long hours in the lab."---Blake Gopnik, Washington Post"The book is so well and so fully illustrated that one could imagine the exhibition had come to one's desk. . . . The three essays accompanying the reproductions add substantially to the knowledge and considerations most of us could bring to its sharply focused theme. Additional illustrations in the essays ensure that the book becomes, in this respect, the exhibition augmented."---Norbert Lynton, The ArtBook"Picasso is intellectually challenging and rewarding, arguedconvincingly with the aid of 150 reproductions. . . . A conviction thatdrawing, painting, sculpture, and photography were deliberately andinnovatively interwoven in Picasso's processes of creation unifies and enlivens this volume throughout." (Choice) Read more About the Author Jeffrey Weiss is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Valerie J. Fletcher is Curator of Sculpture at the Hirshhorn Museum. Kathryn A. Tuma is Assistant Curator of Historical Exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York. Read more
Reviews
This is the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition of the same name at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (October 2003 to January 2004) and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (February to May 2004). It is quite an extraordinary book, as it documents in close detail and yet with broad reference the several months from early spring to late fall in 1909, when Picasso was obsessively creating images of his lover, Fernande Olivier, in a multitude of media encompassing oil, gouache and watercolor, charcoal and graphite, sculpture and photography -- virtually everything but printmaking -- in all about sixty images in the course of a few months. In and through those images, he was wrestling with the creative crisis occasioned by his recognition that he had to free himself from the dual influences of Cezanne and Braque, and in the process he invented cubism. But the immediate result of this feverish activity, unequaled in its unnerving and anxious energy since his preparatory studies for "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" two years earlier, was his creation of "Head of a Woman (Fernande)." That was one of the very few pieces of sculpture he fashioned prior to 1912, but one which has achieved iconic status in the historiography of cubism comparable only to that customarily accorded its older canvas cousin. And why should it not? The achievement was frankly revolutionary; simply put, in this "Head" Picasso reduced natural physiognomy to geometric shapes. How he got to that point, and the attendant circumstances of the development, is what is traced in this excellently illustrated record. The jacket text tells us that there are eighty-two color illustrations and sixty-eight duotones. The reproductions are all of excellent quality, mostly full-page and all at least half-page. The National Gallery's bronze cast of "(Fernande)" is itself photographed from twelve different angles, and there are numerous photographs from Picasso's studios at the time documenting the creation of the works. The book is a visual feast.Three authoritative essays place the material in context. Jeffrey Weiss, the National Gallery's curator of modern and contemporary art and the volume's editor, leads us through the stages from the first appearance of the Fernande type in early spring (in watercolor and gouache) to the sculpted plaster in late fall. He emphasizes that the common denominator of the various images, the down-turned rotation of the head, reflects the long iconographical and allegorical tradition of the representation of melancholy, which, in modern sculpture, begins with Rilke's interpretation of Rodin. He sees it as an indicator ("a displacement or projection") of Picasso's own melancholy state at the time, referring to an important early definition of melancholia that I have quoted in the title of this review (46). Kathryn A. Tuma, a curator at The Drawing Center in New York, has written a brilliantly suggestive and lucid essay on Picasso's struggle with the vestiges of cezannisme in his work; she attributes the artist's extreme restlessness in that summer of 1909 to the "anxiety of influence" -- what remains of Cezanne's own lifelong struggle, she contends, "persists in the transmission of the quality of melancholy" (161). Valerie J. Fletcher, curator of sculpture at the Hirshhorn Museum, contributes a superbly informed piece on process and technique in the sculpture. It is filled with all kinds of recondite and fascinating information ranging from the various methods of casting bronze to the provenance of the plaster and bronze casts we have today, to the sometimes quite obscure fate of the sculptures Picasso sold to Ambroise Vollard "one day, when he needed a pretty large sum of money," as Fernande put it in her memoire (196).Curiously, this transformational period on the road to analytic cubism, and the Fernande series which was its major project, have not before been very extensively investigated, so this very handsomely produced book is an important contribution to our understanding of Picasso's development. The literature devoted to him is enormous, and aficionados of his work must be especially vigilant and judicious in selecting books for their personal library, but this is one that I am very glad to have acquired and that I am happy to recommend.