From 26 August 2017 to 7 January 2018, the Peggy Guggenhei Collectionm presents, in the exhibition spaces of the Project Rooms, the exhibition-dossier PICASSO. On the beach, edited by Luca Massimo Barbero. Inaugurated last February, the "Project Rooms" are two new rooms intended to accommodate collected and targeted exhibition projects, aimed at deepening the work of an artist, or specific themes related to the artistic production of a specific XNUMXth century interpreter, linked to the collection by Peggy
Through a unique and highly refined selection of works, three paintings, ten drawings made by Pablo Picasso between February and December 1937 and a sculpture, exhibited together for the first time on the occasion of the exhibition, Barbero seeks to shed new light on the artist's work Spanish, highlighting his links with the Mediterranean that played such an important role in his artistic career: from his roots in Spain, to life in France, to relationships with artists and art forms that had a point of reference in the Mediterranean. Born from the collaboration with the Musée national Picasso-Paris, the exhibition, collected and focused, unfolds around one of Peggy Guggenheim's most beloved canvases, the Picasso painting On the beach (La Baignade), which today belongs to the Venetian museum.
During the first months of 1937 Picasso responded forcefully to the Spanish Civil War with the engravings The Dream and the Lie of Franco (Sueño y mentira de Franco), an example of which is kept today in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and will be on display, and with the preparatory drawings for Guernica, a Basque town destroyed on April 26 of the same year by the Nazi-fascist Falangist forces with the aim of supporting General Francisco Franco and overthrowing the legitimate government of the Spanish Republic. Guernica was completed in June of the same year for the Spanish pavilion of the Paris International Exhibition. However, in this same period, Picasso executed works that did not reveal, at least apparently, his concern for the political events that were taking place in Spain. The theme of the painting On the Beach, signed and dated February 12, 1937, specifically recalls some paintings from the 20s, one of which is kept in the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum in New York, entitled Three Bathers, 1920. Painted at Le Trem -blay-sur-Mauldre, a small town not far from Versailles, the work recalls the anthropomorphic figures with exaggeratedly accentuated volumes, with an almost sculptural consistency and inserted in seascapes, typical of some of his works executed between the end of the 20s and the early 30s. The two bathers, whose attention is mainly directed to the game with the boat, are graceful and at the same time monstrous figures, and the composition offers itself on the one hand calm and relaxed, suspended in its subtle lyricism, on the other it transmits a veiled sense of threat for the sinister presence of the figure that stands out on the horizon. A sense of impotent voyeurism, suggested by the man who observes the florid girls, brings to mind certain classical myths such as Diana's bath and some biblical episodes such as Susanna and the old men. The preparatory drawing for On the Beach, coming from the Musée national Picasso-Paris and apparently executed on the same day as the painting, will be exhibited in Venice for the first time together with another preparatory drawing, which appears to be almost entirely unpublished to date. Donated by Picasso to Dora Maar, this last work on paper is linked both to the first phase of creation of On the beach and to the figure of Femme assise sur la plage, a masterpiece belonging to the collections of the Musée des Beaux Arts de Lyon, dated 10 February 1937 , also on display.
With a subtle play of insights and cross-references, the reconstruction of the creative process that led Picasso to paint On the Beach continues precisely through Femme assise sur la plage. Dating a few days before the Venetian painting, this splendid mixed technique oil on canvas can be considered as the first real result of the incessant formal research that Picasso was experimenting with and that he would materialize completely a few days later, in On the beach. The canvas depicts a naked bather on a beach, surprised in a banal gesture. The curve of the body stretched out into space, the plastic-volumetric treatment of the exaggeratedly buxom and anatomically simplified shapes, combined with an atmosphere of silent lyricism, almost explicitly bring us back to the bather on the right of the great painting from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
The exhibition itinerary concludes with a third extremely high test offered by Picasso in February of that same year, the Grande Baigneuse au livre, also kept in the spaces of the Musée national Picasso-Paris. It is a work painted a week later than On the Beach, more precisely on February 18, 1937, in Le-Tremblay sur Mauldre, where the artist had bought an old country house. The Grande Baigneuse is transformed here into a large sculpture, greyish-white in colour, with crossed legs, the head bent over the book and supported by the elbows. Once again he is an imperturbable figure, immersed in an environment made of stillness and silence, with an enigmatic and little connoted face; however, something seems to change in the Spanish artist's unstoppable research: with the third Grande Bagneuse Picasso seems to abandon, at least in part, the formal delicacy of the previous bathers in favor of a more static construction of the forms by planes and a stubbornly angular style, almost cubist.
With his numerous representations of beaches and bathers, Picasso has certainly not discovered a new subject but he has identified and revealed the only true "external scenario" of his entire oeuvre. Like most of his themes, the concept of the nude is addressed in both a traditional and a more properly modern way. Giorgione, Titian, Ingres, Puvis de Chavannes, Manet, Cezanne, Matisse, Renoir are all artists to whom Picasso appears to have looked as a source of inspiration for his figurations and compositional structures; the theme of the moving nude is a recurring theme of primary importance for all those artists interested in figurative painting. However, the step forward made by the artist is not given by the subject but rather by the way in which the Spanish genius, by linking individual experience to traditional forms, created not only something new but absolutely revolutionary.
Picasso Ph: Matteo de Fina
