The year 1932 played host to an important exhibition in the life and career of the famed Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. The Galleries Georges Petit offered a rare opportunity to living artists, a retrospective of their life’s work on display in the heart of Paris. The gallery had just finished a successful run of a major exhibition of Henri Matisse. Picasso, always hot on his friend and rival’s heels, secured his own retrospective with the gallery the following year. He took complete control of curating the exhibition, bringing together his different ‘periods’ and refusing to abide by a chronological arrangement. As well as hanging his past work, Picasso strove to create a large series of work especially for the exhibition, thus producing masterpieces that would lead to 1932 being dubbed his ‘year of wonders’. The exhibition at the Tate Modern brought together many of the pieces from this historic retrospective with a renewed understanding of his inspirations. The exhibition opened in June 1932, and much like the visitors back then, we couldn’t help but notice the recurrence of a distinctive profile, short waxen hair and a voluptuous figure that lounges sensually within her countless frames.
His new muse was a young woman named Marie-Thérèse Walter, who had managed to secure the attention of the renowned philanderer, while he was still married to his first wife, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova. His trysts with Marie-Thérèse were kept secret, but he could not hide the growing influence her image and their relationship had on his work, his obsession with her expressed through every medium within his grasp, her recognizable features dominating the exhibition.
His portraits of Marie-Thérèse show her in a passive and relaxed pose, a naked curvaceous body often painted in a cool lilac, swells with sexuality, comfortable and willing in her lover’s fervent gaze. She sleeps peacefully in an armchair, in ’Le Rêve’ one of his most famous paintings of her. Her head tilted back, her vest slipping from her shoulder, exposing her left breast, her hands brought together on her lap to make a suggestive gesture, a phallic shadow sliding past her mouth suggestively. His depiction of his wife Olga in ‘Rest’, on the other hand, is wrought with aggression. The figure’s elongated arms flail, her hair wild, her mouth a gape, yet her teeth, set in a vaginal shape in the middle of her face, are gritted. The whole body is in discord, as it seems to swirl into an unrecognizable shape, shedding her breasts, telling signs that their relationship was in turmoil, on the verge of collapse.
Much like with his women, Picasso could not commit to one single medium or art movement. His move to an eighteenth-century château gave him the space to add sculpture to his repertoire. Marie-Thérèse’s silhouette was re-modelled in clay, her nose accentuated to form a representation of the artist’s penis. In the exhibition you can see his reluctance to devote his craft one movement, exploring surrealism, cubism, fauvism and elements of primitivism. Some experiments into new techniques may have been born for his friendly rivalry with his predecessor Matisse, possibly trying to outdo the master at his own craft. Though radical explorations of the human body influenced a new class of ideas and techniques, Picasso continued to tap into traditional themes and composition. The painting ‘Woman with a Dagger’ was modelled on Jacques-Louis David's famous painting ‘The Death of Marat’. His later drawings of 1932 included a series of monochrome ink drawings inspired by Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece to create his Crucifixion drawings.
In the autumn of 1932, Picasso’s work was further influenced by Marie-Thérèse. His muse, a keen swimmer had suffered a serious infection while swimming in a sewage contaminated river. The paintings he created showed women being rescued from drowning, though Picasso adds a sense of sexual violence between the victim and the rescuer. In ‘Le Sauvage’ he idealizes his female forms as the mythical nymphs from mythology, on the left-hand side the naked figures play with a ball on the beach, while other figures swim and jump to the rescue of a drowning nymph, who is hoisted up by one of her sisters, her mouth open wide, gasping for air. All the figures were modelled on Marie-Thérèse, their hair is void of their usual golden hue, as the sickness made her hair fall out.
His relationship with Marie-Thérèse was finally uncovered by Olga in 1935, when Marie-Thérèse became pregnant. His painting ‘Woman with a Dagger’ completed in late 1931, was a prominent piece within the exhibition. It depicts a woman seemingly falling from the ceiling, her mouth agape in a silent scream, as she pierces her needle thin knife into the chest of her love rival, laid out on the bed beneath her. Blood escapes the dagger’s point, spilling away like smoke. In hindsight it seems that the painting was not only a fear he had but a more violent prediction of what came to pass several years later, when Marie-Thérèse, now mother to his daughter Maya, violently confronted his new mistress Dora Maar, the surrealist photographer in his studio much to the Picasso’s amusement.
The exhibition was as much of a triumph back in 1932 in Galleries Georges Petit as it was in 2018 at the Tate Modern. People were clustered around his portraits, witnessing the painted clash of two lovers, one blossoming with new found passion and comfort while the other deteriorates in a violent explosion of despair and anxiety. Picasso’s renowned need to constantly exert his own dominance over his lovers is blaringly obvious in this exhibit. He always manages to judge his sitters on their attractiveness and sexual prowess, destroying those who are no longer complacent and awarding the willing and obedient with love and fame. Both women were immortalized in his vision during one of the most productive mid-life crises in art history.
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