Erotic Picasso
Web log entries dealing with sexuality in the art of Pablo Picasso, particularly the Erotic Picasso or Picasso Erotique exhibit on display in 2001.
GALLERIES
The Erotic Picasso exhibit may never come to the US, but the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume has
thirty selections from Erotic Picasso online in postcard-size reproductions. Follow the link that reads "Sélection d'oeuvres."
rmn.fr
The Galleria d'arte l,incontro presents twelve
erotic drawings by Picasso in its online gallery. Follow the "next" links to view the entire series.
Galleria d'arte l,incontro
The Picasso Conspiracy has a large section devoted to authenticating what it calls
"Picasso's unknown 1934 masterpiece." Many pages reproduce "related Picassos" for comparison, including
Phallus and Nude (1903),
The Mackerel (1903) and
three erotic compositions from the 1950s and 1960s.
Picasso Conspiracy
The Picasso Erotique exhibition is currently on display at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the museum's website has a nice online essay about the show with a half-dozen reproductions.
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
ARTICLES & REVIEWS
In the Daily Mail & Guardian, Stuart Jeffries reports that "the organisers of the first comprehensive exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s erotic art are basking in Gallic smugness, claiming
Anglo-Saxons are too politically correct to show works from the Spanish artist’s extremely blue period." The exhibition, featuring "depictions of cunnilingus, masturbation, troilism, bestiality, voyeurism, sodomy and other sexual practices that may well not have names," is scheduled to move from Paris to Barcelona to Montreal, but there are currently no plans to show it in Britain or the United States.
Daily Mail and Guardian
Anna Rohleder reviews the
Erotic Picasso exhibit in Paris. "By turn, tender and racy, the subjects range from brothel scenes Picasso recorded in his youth to the voyeuristic sketches of his old age. In between, his wives, mistresses and muses make appearances in the eye-bending contortions of his Cubist and Surrealist periods."
Forbes
Waldemar Januszczak reviews the
Erotic Picasso exhibit in Paris. Januszczak puts the works in context with biographical details about Picasso's precocious
sexual education in Barcelona and lifelong sexual voracity. The exhibit never "settles down to a single position
on sex, a central preoccupation, one way of doing it. Drawn on scraps of wrapping paper, on ledgers, postcards, the
first brothel scenes are evidence of Picasso's compulsion to witness. But the images I like best, the ones that are
surely most astonishing, and new, are those that have an aura of mystical import about them." An online gallery of
sixteen images accompanies the article.
The Times
An exhibition of
Picasso's erotic paintings, drawings and
engravings opens in Paris this week at the Musée du Jeu de Paume, entitled Picasso Érotiqe.
Many of the works have been kept in storage for decades or exhibited only in carefully guarded private settings.
The director of the Picasso Museum, Gérard Régnier, notes, "Some people said that by looking at Picasso through
an erotic angle, we were publicising the dirty side of the artist. It was covered up for a long time. But, in a sense,
all Picasso's work is erotic." The exhibition will travel to Montreal and Barcelona later in the year, but there are
currently no plans to show it in the United States.
The Times
David Steinberg looks at
Yahoo's porn backtrack as just another example of America's guilt-ridden marginalization of erotic life. Nice people don't do that, and neither do nice corporations. In the same vein, Steinberg laments the fact that no American museum is willing to host a travelling exhibition of Pablo Picasso's erotic drawings, engravings, and sculptures, which is currently slated for Paris, Barcelona and Montreal.
Sexuality.org
Nicholas Le Quesne reviews the
Erotic Picasso exhibition in Paris. "Yet beneath this multitude of styles, the content remains the same. Sexuality, as portrayed by Picasso, is aggressively male and heterosexual. Women are dwarfed by huge phalluses, their faces sculpted from male genitalia. Perspective is subverted to present female bodies as rolling landscapes of breasts and orifices."
Time Europe
MORE ABOUT PICASSO
Picasso's Nu au collier, a portrait of his mistress/model Marie-Therese Walters, sold for £16 million at auction, roughly double what Christie's had projected. An auction house rep says, "Nu au collier dates from the height of their love affair and the fluid, sensuous forms of the painting reflect Picasso's love and desire for his young and beautiful muse." I love this anecdote:
Nu au collier was painted in 1932, five years after the artist first met Walters on the street and reportedly said: "I am Picasso. You and I are going to do great things together."
It's true: Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole. (Jun 2002)
