{"id":134352,"date":"2025-08-10T12:44:27","date_gmt":"2025-08-10T12:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/134352\/"},"modified":"2025-08-10T12:44:27","modified_gmt":"2025-08-10T12:44:27","slug":"the-secrets-of-the-places-where-he-lived-and-loved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/134352\/","title":{"rendered":"the secrets of the places where he lived and loved"},"content":{"rendered":"

Life is art. There are few artists for whom that\u2019s more true than for Picasso. You can chart the ups and downs of his romances through his canvases \u2014 and establish overlapping timelines; you can assess his emotional state; you can estimate his affluence (consistently increasing) or the size of the space he\u2019s working in (ditto). Even his interior scenes function as a kind of self-portrait.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interior spaces that form the backbone of the forthcoming exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI), Picasso: From the Studio. Curated with the Mus\u00e9e Picasso in Paris, with a large number of loans from that elegant institution, it takes a chronological journey through the Spanish artist\u2019s career, via the key locations in France in which he worked.<\/p>\n

It will look at how the artist\u2019s environment influenced his output, from soon after his arrival in Paris from Barcelona at the start of the 20th century to his last home and studio at Mougins, through paintings, sculptures, ceramics and works on paper, photography and rarely seen film. There are more than 150 recorded places that Picasso made art throughout his life, but the exhibition begins around 1912, as Picasso and Georges Braque were egging each other on to develop cubism. Small assemblages and collages from this time, including the gallery\u2019s own 1913 collage Bottle and Newspaper, will feature alongside works made of scavenged materials: paper scraps, stencilled letters, canvas, wood, pliable tin, nails, sand and paint. <\/p>\n

\"Illustration<\/p>\n

Picasso\u2019s Woman Reading, 1935<\/p>\n

ADRIEN DIDIERJEAN\/MUS\u00c9E NATIONAL PICASSO-PARIS; SUCCESSION PICASSO\/DACS, LONDON 2025; GRANDPALAISRM<\/p>\n

These experiments show how the studio was \u201cthe laboratory of his work\u201d, the exhibition\u2019s co-curator Joanne Snrech says, but their modest size reflects the ad hoc spaces in which he worked \u2014 easier to lug around Paris to the next ramshackle spot. <\/p>\n

By the Twenties Picasso was a success. He was collaborating with Serge Diaghilev\u2019s Ballets Russes, and having married the dancer Olga Khokhlova in 1918 was a darling of society.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Picasso or Goya: who created Spain\u2019s most important painting?<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

As he holidayed on the newly fashionable C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur, the sea, sunlight and the company of glam pals imbued Picasso\u2019s work with a sunny exuberance. These paintings (because Picasso worked everywhere, even on holiday) exude the heat of the Riviera \u2014 a rare landscape made at his summer studio in Juan-les-Pins, where he and Olga stayed in 1920, or the jolly Still Life with a Mandolin from 1924, both in the show. <\/p>\n

During the Thirties, though, all sorts of shifts happened. In 1927 Picasso, aged 45, had met 17-year-old Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se Walter outside a Paris department store, and started a relationship with her. In 1930 he bought a manor house at Boisgeloup in Normandy, about 45 miles from his Paris home, establishing a studio on the light-filled second floor, and began dividing his time between it and Paris. Olga stayed in the city with their son, Paolo, during the week, so the painter was free to have his young mistress visit him often in Boisgeloup.<\/p>\n

They kept the relationship secret for eight years \u2014 goodness knows how, since Walter haunts his work throughout this period, her golden hair and almond-shaped eyes unmistakable even when distorted by cubism. Nearly all the show\u2019s works from this studio depict her, including a serene portrait from 1937, two years after the birth of their daughter, Maya, at which time Picasso tried to divorce Olga (she refused; they stayed married until her death in 1955) \u2014 and around the time that he met the photographer Dora Maar, of whom, inevitably, more later.<\/p>\n

Boisgeloup didn\u2019t just enable the indulgence of a new muse. A large outbuilding allowed him to more intensely explore sculpture, especially monumental heads and busts. You can guess the dominant subject. <\/p>\n

\"Picasso's<\/p>\n

Head of a Woman, 1953<\/p>\n

ADRIEN DIDIERJEAN\/MUS\u00c9E NATIONAL PICASSO-PARIS; SUCCESSION PICASSO\/DACS, LONDON 202; GRANDPALAISRMN<\/p>\n

His next studio was on the Rue des Grands-Augustins in the Saint-Germain-des-Pr\u00e9s district of Paris. Picasso liked it because the shabby 17th-century townhouse had a connection to Balzac as the residence for the painter Frenhofer, the main character in his novel The Unknown Masterpiece. It is where Picasso painted probably his second most famous work (the first being his 1907 masterpiece Les Demoiselles d\u2019Avignon). Guernica was a commission from the Republican government for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris. <\/p>\n

\u2022 Read more art reviews, guides and interviews<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

Maar found the vast attic studio for him \u2014 partly thanks to it being a meeting place for the resistance group Contre-attaque, of which she had been a member \u2014 and secured exclusive rights to document the painting\u2019s creation for the magazine Cahiers d\u2019art. Quite different from Walter, whom the co-curator Janet McLean describes as \u201cdreamy and romantic\u201d, Maar was fiery and passionately left-wing, and as she documented his work, \u201cthey were bouncing off each other \u2026 it was a meeting of minds for sure,\u201d her political zeal influencing the direction of the painting.<\/p>\n

Sadly, Guernica doesn\u2019t travel, but several works from the period give a sense of the tension and confinement of those difficult years. \u201cI\u2019m glad we\u2019re able to show these quite frugal paintings made in 1938, when there were a lot of refugees coming to France due to the Spanish Civil War,\u201d McLean says. One such is Child with a Lollipop Sitting Under a Chair, donated by Maya to the Mus\u00e9e Picasso a few years ago. Painted in sombre monochrome, \u201cit\u2019s not a pretty picture of a child\u201d, McLean says; instead it has a huddled, claustrophobic feel. \u201cIt\u2019s interesting to show Picasso connected to the world, because he really was.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not known why Picasso elected to remain in Paris as the Second World War intensified \u2014 he was unable to exhibit, the Nazi regime considered his work \u201cdegenerate\u201d \u2014 but he kept working away in his attic, photographed there in 1944 by Brassa\u00ef. A shot from this series will be in the exhibition, alongside Bust of a Woman with a Blue Hat, a portrait of Maar made the same year, just after their not-quite-definitive break-up (they continued to see each other intermittently until 1946).<\/p>\n

\"Picasso's<\/p>\n

Bust of a Woman with a Blue Hat, 1944<\/p>\n

MUS\u00c9E NATIONAL PICASSO, PARIS \u00a9 SUCCESSION PICASSO\/DACS, LONDON 2025 \u00a9 GRANDPALAISRMN<\/p>\n

One of the aims of the exhibition, McLean says, is to show \u201cPicasso\u2019s versatility as an artist. While he considered himself primarily a painter, he was exceptional in his ability to turn his hand to any medium.\u201d A wonderful example of this is his playful ceramics, influenced by the studio he took from 1948-55 at Vallauris, a small town on the C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur. <\/p>\n

It was home to a number of ceramic factories, depicted in Picasso\u2019s 1951 canvas Smoke in Vallauris, where thick black puffs pump urgently into the sky from the wood-burning kilns. Inspired by Georges and Suzanne Rami\u00e9, the owners of the Madoura Pottery, he bought a villa nearby and set about learning from Suzanne, saying: \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019m a ceramicist, next to ceramicists who are real ceramicists, I\u2019m just [\u2026] an unfortunate amateur and an ignoramus. I try, I listen, I look, I try to pass my time.\u201d <\/p>\n

He produced more than 3,600 pieces in just a few years, several of which will be on display, including a dove modelled ingeniously out of a few flops of folded clay. He got so into it that an American newspaper referred to him as \u201cleft-wing ceramicist artist Picasso\u201d. He was, at the time, active as part of the Movement for Peace and the French Communist Party. He enjoyed collaborating with his fellow artisans, and was active in the community, attending local bullfights and openings of pottery exhibitions, for which he designed the posters (free of charge), and portrayed his family life in pictures as part of a simple creative ideal. <\/p>\n

\u2022 My journey through the French region most famous for its artists<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

A touching example of this is the 1954 canvas Claude drawing, Fran\u00e7oise and Paloma, a harmonious image depicting his two youngest children with their mother, the painter Fran\u00e7oise Gilot, whom he had met in 1943 (he 61, she 21) \u2014 except that Gilot is shown oddly only as an outline, curved protectively around her children. She had left him and returned to Paris with them the year before.<\/p>\n

Still, his time in Vallauris was transformative for his output and for the town. In 1949 he donated his sculpture L\u2019Homme au mouton (Man with a sheep) \u2014 it\u2019s still on the market square \u2014 and in 1951 he created the War and Peace cycle in a local chapel. His presence, McLean says, \u201crevitalised the ceramics industry in that region\u201d.<\/p>\n

Man of the people he may have been, but he was also very rich, and in 1955 he acquired La Californie, a des res in Cannes, where for the first time he lived and worked in the same space, which must have been inconvenient for his family (he had met his new partner, Jacqueline Roque, in 1952, when she was 26 and he was 70), given the rapid accumulation of artworks that filled every inch. <\/p>\n

\"Pablo<\/p>\n

With Jacqueline Roque<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

The three adjoining rooms on the ground floor served as studio and living area, with rounded windows that opened onto a lush garden into which his sculpture spilled (the show features a great 1960-61 photograph of him there by Andr\u00e9 Sonine). <\/p>\n

He seems to have seen La Californie as a sort of extension of himself, judging by the vigour with which he depicts it in his art. \u201cThis was the first time he had paid so much attention to his studio,\u201d Snrech writes in the catalogue, \u201cto the extent that these works can be seen almost as self-portraits.\u201d <\/p>\n

Several will be on display, including a magnificent 1956 canvas made in homage to Henri Matisse, who had died in 1954. The room is empty of people, but the painter\u2019s presence is suggested by paintings and objects, and in the centre a blank canvas sits expectantly on an easel. Picasso called these paintings \u201cinterior landscapes\u201d.<\/p>\n

Eventually the lack of privacy in fast-developing Cannes drove him out. In 1961 \u2014 the year that he married Jacqueline at the town hall in Vallauris \u2014 he moved to his final studio, the Notre Dame de Vie farmhouse in the nearby town of Mougins. Surrounded by work from across his life (an entire wing was dedicated to the display of his sculptures), this was the scene of a final flowering, a period of insane productivity. He produced about 200 paintings between September 1970 and June 1972, and he created more portraits of Jacqueline than of any of his other partners. <\/p>\n

\"Pablo<\/p>\n

Picasso in Mougins, France, 1971<\/p>\n

RALPH GATTI\/AFP\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

In contrast to the hurly-burly of La Californie, he worked in relative solitude, assailed by memory \u2014 in a series of etchings, La Suite 347, created when he was 86, he returns to motifs such as bullfighters, circus performers, artists and models, mythology and literature, musketeers and animals \u2014 and by an urgent need to innovate, seen in the free, gestural brushstrokes of paintings such as Reclining Nude, 1967.<\/p>\n

It was here that he died, in April 1973, probably from a heart attack. According to Paris Match, Jacqueline called his doctor in the early hours of the morning; he died a few hours later, at 11.45am, at the age of 91. There was no will, of course (not his problem), and more than 45,000 unsold works strewn across his various studios. An artist, first, foremost and only, to the last.<\/p>\n

Picasso: From the Studio is at the National Gallery of Ireland, October 9 to February 22, <\/b>nationalgallery.ie<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Life is art. There are few artists for whom that\u2019s more true than for Picasso. You can chart…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":134353,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,1033,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-134352","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115004536678020857","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}