KPLU Local News
(2010-10-10)
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Three Figures Under a Tree by Pablo Picasso, Winter 1907-08.
Courtesy Musee National Picasso, Paris
(KPLU) -
It's a two-escalator ride up to the blockbuster Picasso show at the Seattle Art Museum. If you don't know where you're headed, just follow an orange-colored line that marks the way. Or, you can always tail museum-goers who want nothing more than an up-close look at Picasso's work.
"He's a genius. Exaggerated shapes and kind of odd representations of people and faces," one man says.
"What do you think?" a woman is asked. She replies: "I think of beautiful confusion."
And a second man: "Some of his really abstract figurative things, it's like 'Holy cow!' It makes you stop and look at art and look at life in a little different perspective."
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| "La Femme qui pleure (Weeping Woman)" by Pablo Picasso, Oct. 18, 1937Courtesy of SAM |
The rooms here are filled with African and Oceanic art. A little known fact about Pablo Picasso: he was passionate about these types of wooden masks and sculptures.
On this day, while most people walked on by, architect Jerry Saulter takes in the African art.
"I love this work. I collect folk art and I have a collection of African art," he says.
He's the first person spotted who has actually stopped to look at this art.
"The people here who did this art did a very very good job of simplifying and stylizing the planes in the face; the eyes, the way they're done; the nose. And Picasso did that as well."
It's an appreciation that is exactly on target, says SAM curator Pam McClusky, standing in front of the kinds of masks that influenced Picasso's work.
"If you look at something like this mask right here. Each of the features of the face are completely taken out of the plane of the face. So you get the two eyes are like big cylinders plopped on the face. And this 'wedge of cheese' nose is right in the middle. And the mouth becomes an extending rectangle. And when you see in the exhibition the guitar that he composes that are just planes one after the other, that's adapting what he saw in this," she explains.
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| "Portrait de Dora Maar" by Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973Courtesy of SAM |
"Henri Matisse had been at Gertrude Stein's in the autumn of 1906 and showed him an African sculpture. And Picasso just got enthralled with it."
That's when Picasso started collecting this art.
"He loved in his studio putting on masks and talking about metamorphosis. About how you could become something else. And that was something he was constantly playing around with."
SAM's Picasso show is the first of its kind in the U.S. in 30 years. And it's McClusky, curator of African and Oceanic art, who actually got the ball rolling on the idea.
A few years ago she picked up a book by Peter Stepan celebrating Picasso's interest in art from Africa and the Pacific Islands.
"When this came out I said, "wow, we should do something!' This provocative, very bold artist who set a course for the 20th century. Why don't we have at least a handful of pieces?"
She envisioned a small Picasso exhibit that could play off SAM's African collection. But when the Seattle Art Museum approached Paris's Picasso museum about this idea, they were told more than 100 Picassos would be available. The Paris museum was about to close temporarily for a renovation. So the small show turned into a major overview of Picasso's career.
Anne Baldassari directs the Musee National Picasso, Paris. She says this show allows visitors to really get inside the master's head.
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| "La lecture (Reading)" by Pablo Picasso, Jan. 2, 1932Courtesy of SAM |
The exhibit moves in chronological order: from his cubist years to a kind of realism after he fell in love with a ballerina, to his bold surrealist work.
Right outside the show's entrance, in the African galleries, there's a large photo of the artist in his studio surrounded by African art. In front of the photo, there are masks from the SAM collection that mirror the ones Picasso collected.
McClusky says the artist would have loved wandering through all these galleries.
"He had this game he used to play called "The Museum of the Mind," says SAM's McCluskey. "What are the great things that you would put in a museum for yourself? And Which are the things that rise to the top that you can't live without knowing or looking at again and again?"
If you come see the show, the museum has made it made it easy to see the connections between its permanent collection and what you'll see in the Picasso exhibit.
Just look for the labels that are marked with a symbol of an orange eye.
Florangela Davila, KPLU News.
"Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, Paris" continues at the Seattle Art Museum through Jan. 17, 2011.
Seattle Art Museum's "Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, Paris" website
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