Magician of the Modern by Eugene R. Gaddis

Author:Eugene R. Gaddis [Gaddis, Eugene R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76124-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

Avery Court with Venus with Satyr and Nymph of 1600 by Pietro Francavilla, Wadsworth Atheneum, during the Picasso exhibition, February 1934 (illustration credit 11.1)

Moving out onto the balconies that surrounded the court, visitors came to the Picassos. To eyes still unaccustomed to the explosions of modernism, the Spaniard’s forceful lines and audacious colors, presented against the white walls, seemed to vibrate. Viewers could experience Picasso’s entire career, from an impressionistic portrait of a mother and child in 1895, painted when he was in his teens, to three brazenly adventurous canvases from 1932.

Many of these works became icons of Picasso’s genius. There was the painfully bright Au Moulin Rouge of 1901—a jaded prostitute stares at the viewer while cancan girls dance in the background—painted in thickly applied white, red, orange, and yellow, a work that looked back to Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh and forward to the Fauves. From the “blue period” came The Old Guitarist of 1903, the famous study of misery reduced to angles, loaned by the Art Institute of Chicago. From the “rose period” were such pictures as The Girl with a Fan of 1905—a figure stands in profile in the style of an Egyptian wall drawing; the tender Harlequins Family of the same year; La Toilette, also from 1905, a work of delicate beauty, almost suggested rather than painted, in terracottas and blues, in which a nude woman gathers her hair over her head while her maid holds a mirror. Then there were such anomalies as the cleanly drawn Sleeping Peasants of 1919, in which a young man and woman, both round, fleshy, and partially undressed, sprawl on the ground, exhausted after a tumble in the hay.

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