Pablo Picasso returns to Rome 100 years after the journey he made there at the age of 37 in the stormy climate of 1917 at the height of the world war. In fact, the Quirinale stables are dedicating a very interesting exhibition to the great Spanish painter that embraces a fundamental decade of Picasso's artistic and human life, the years from 1915 to 1925. Picasso made his trip to Italy, to Rome and Naples from Paris , where he led the Cubist revolution. In Rome he will meet, among other things, an attractive Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova who will later become his wife.
The exhibition entitled “Picasso. Between Cubism and Classicism 1915-1925” brings together more than one hundred masterpieces including canvases, gouaches and drawings as well as photographs, autographed letters and other documents carefully selected by the curator Olivier Berggruen with Anunciata von Liechtenstein. Among these, the Portrait of Olga in an armchair (1918), Harlequin (Léonide Massine) (1917), Still life with guitar, bottle, fruit, plate and glass on table (1919), Two women running on the beach (The run) (1922) work chosen as the poster for the exhibition, Pan flute (1923), Seated acrobat with folded arms (1923), Harlequin with Mirror (1923), Paulo as Harlequin (1924), Paulo as Pierrot (1925). For Picasso it was a period of profound rethinking of his own identity.
The war deprived the Spanish artist of his traveling companions: the painter Georges Braque and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire enlisted in the army and the merchant Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was forced, due to his German origins and his sympathies French, to seek exile in Switzerland. Picasso finds himself working in solitude in his Parisian studio on rue Schoelcher and the photographs that portray him bear witness to the versatility he attributes to his own image: that of a fierce artist with multiple identities, who challenges the art world as he gradually of a wrestler, a worker, an artist from Montmartre and a Parisian bourgeois. From this point of view, the trip to Italy acquires a fundamental importance in the artist's life. Here he meets the art of Raphael, in Naples he admires the Farnese Hercules and the other classical masterpieces of the Archaeological Museum. Not to mention the artistic and emotional impact that the mysterious charm of the Pompeii frescoes had on him.
Picasso went to Italy in the wake of his friend Jean Cocteau, whom he met two years earlier, introduced to him by the composer Edgar Varese. And it is Cocteau who fascinates him with the Burlesque ballet project that he is staging with Diaghilev's Russian ballet company. From the meeting with Diaghilev he takes cover "Parade" a dance show that the Russian ballets are preparing for Rome.
All this baggage of new experiences represents the focus of the exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale. The exhibition focuses in particular on the pastiche method, analyzing the methods and procedures through which Picasso used it as a tool at the service of modernism, in one of the most original and extraordinary journeys from realism to abstraction in the history of art. modern. The work done for the ballet Parade, to music by Satie, as his friend and critic Apollinaire will specify, will be destined to greatly upset the ideas of the spectators and the very production of the "genius Picasso". Alongside Parade also the sketches for the sets and backdrops for the ballet Pulcinella, two theatrical performances strongly influenced by the experience of the Italian tour.
The exhibition illustrates Picasso's experiments with different styles and genres: from the play of decorative surfaces in collages, made during the First World War, to the stylized realism of the "Diaghilev years", from still life to portraits.
The exhibition therefore documents the long-term impact of the stay in Italy on the Spanish master's art, an impact highlighted by the numerous works of classical inspiration created in the period following that trip; works conceived and elaborated in a very personal way, as the curator Olivier Berggruen points out: «Of the ancient statues he was struck by the monumentality and hidden sensuality, more than the shapes and proportions. But then, anticipating certain modern transgressions, Picasso had begun to put together "high" and "low" with great ease. In his desire for an art that was at the same time more modern but also more primitive, becoming even more interested in all those worlds "on the margins of classicism", preferring the Etruscans to Ancient Rome and the Renaissance, the erotic frescoes of Pompeii, the masks of the Commedia dell'arte, the frenetic life of via Margutta in 1917, or that of the alleys of Naples».
If Rome puts Picasso in contact with the great Roman artistic tradition, in Naples the artist while walking through the alleys of Forcella with the great Russian composer Igor Stravinskij, whose famous portrait can be admired on display, comes across a puppet show of the commedia dell'arte, traditional open-air theatrical performances of the Pulcinella mask. The modest show offered by the Neapolitan theater reaffirms both artists' taste for popular and traditional art forms and represents proof that the simplest artistic expression could have universal appeal.
Disparate sources of inspiration, ranging from the lowest to the highest, can be integrated into their works, just as the Roman landscape offers a vision in which antiquities, Renaissance churches and Baroque palaces seem to merge.
In the wake of his trip to Italy, Picasso renews the traditional depictions of acrobats and circus performers from his youth, the nostalgic portraits of artists often caught posing and meditative. The subjects that had populated the blue and pink periods then become the models of his personal artistic vision so the figure of the harlequin becomes a metaphor for the painter's creative process. Picasso becomes a skilled juggler of styles capable of passing from thoughtful depictions of bathers and street artists to ironic still lifes, from decorative cubist compositions to introverted portraits. This period of stylistic experimentation culminates in the convulsive "La danse" of 1925 which marks his farewell to the world of dance and is consistently the last work on display.
The exhibition, which will remain open until 21 January, was made possible thanks to 38 lenders. Unique works from Europe, the United States and Japan. Musée Picasso, Center Pompidou in Paris, Tate in London, and again the MoMa, the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim in New York, and then again the Museum Berggruen in Berlin, the Fundació Museu Picasso in Barcelona and the Tyssen Museum in Madrid to name a few some. "It's an exhibition that has been working on since 2015 and which presents itself as one of the most important exhibitions ever dedicated to Picasso in Italy" underlines Mario De Simoni, President and CEO of Ales spa, co-producer of the exhibition with MondoMostre Skira and with the participation of the National Galleries of Ancient Art.
The project was developed under the supervision of a prestigious scientific committee composed of Carmen Gimenez, Laurent Le Bon, Brigitte Léal, Valentina Moncada, Bernard Ruiz Picasso and Gary Tinterow. The staging is curated by Studio Selldorf in New York.
