Picasso et al.
Took an overnight trip to Barcelona recently to see the special exhibition at the Picasso Museum—“Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler: Dealer and Publisher” thru March 19th—you’ve got nine more days!
It’s not a very big deal to go into town from where we live, but I wanted to get away, visit my favorite noodle joint, and have an American-style cookie which is just about impossible in Sitges. Of all the things I miss about the States, proper cookies top the list.
“MUSEUM BRAIN” is a real problem; that’s where you start to zone out after about an hour of looking and then just trot through the rest of the exhibit. Also, all that standing and looking and thinking and bad posture gives me a huge backache, so I try to go back to my favorite museums and sometimes start at the end, or take a left instead of a right—skip the headliners and find some out of the way corners at the end I had only ever skimmed past before.
I did this on a recent trip to the British Museum in London, and look who I met in the Enlightenment Gallery.
Mummies notwithstanding, that gallery is definitely an Mmmmm…Yuck! sort of affair, as this original collection, a bequest from physician, naturalist and collector Sir Hans Sloane of 71,000 books, manuscripts, instruments, specimens and artifacts which became the foundation of the British Museum in 1753, shows the Enlightenment urge to explore and understand an Earth previously little known or studied by Europeans (the Mmmmm) primarily achieved through colonialism and the exploitation of indigenous peoples and cultures (the Yuck!)
BACK TO THE PICASSO MUSEUM, the special exhibit of the life, work and artists surrounding Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was fascinating; this is the Paris dealer who first sold the paintings of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, André Derain, Fernand Léger, and Juan Gris to the likes of Gertrude Stein and her family, friends, and hangers-on.
Kahnweiler was an early champion and major force behind Cubism and 20th century art connoisseurship, and even produced a series of over 40 “Beaux Livres” (beautiful books)—folio-quality volumes of modern writers and poets (including Stein, and Max Jacob) illustrated by the artists in his circle. The exhibit had a good selection of these, and a wide representation of work by the other featured artists besides Picasso.
Kahnweiler’s life was not without immense challenges: twice, in World War I and World War II, he lost his gallery and inventory of the iconic artists he represented. In a sick twist of fate, the first time his Paris gallery and collection were seized as “enemy property” and later auctioned as part of German reparations for WW1 because he was a German national living in France; and the second time, came when, as a Jew, he was forced into hiding by Nazi Germany’s invasion of France in WW2.
The special exhibit took a good hour and a half to get through (cue the backache) so I really just scuttled through the other galleries—I’ve been three times, and expect to visit the Museo Picasso Málaga next month.
I’ll leave you with Kahnweiler’s own words regarding Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907, shown below) which he regarded as the beginning of Cubism, though it remained unsold in Picasso’s studio for many years, and never exhibited until 1916:
Early in 1907 Picasso began a strange large painting depicting women, fruit and drapery[…]The nudes, with large, quiet eyes, stand rigid, like mannequins. Their stiff, round bodies are flesh-colored, black and white. That is the style of 1906.
In the foreground, however, alien to the style of the rest of the painting, appear a crouching figure and a bowl of fruit. These forms are drawn angularly, not roundly modeled in chiaroscuro. The colors are luscious blue, strident yellow, next to pure black and white. This is the beginning of Cubism, the first upsurge, a desperate titanic clash with all of the problems at once.
— Kahnweiler, 1920
Kahnweiler, Daniel Henry (13 January 1949). "Rise of cubism". New York,: Wittenborn, Schultz – via Internet Archive.